The R8 RWS arrives in Australia

This is a car that wouldn't have exactly fitted in when Audi's high-performance arm was called quattro GmbH. 

But when quattro (four, in Italian) became Audi Sport, suddenly, the irony of a rear-wheel drive R8 disappeared, leaving only the joy of a rear-wheel drive R8 behind.

And what a joy it turns out to be. It turns the R8 from a foolproof fast supercar into an agile, responsive, lively, bellowing bundle of emotion and fever. The leap from the R8 V10 to the R8 V10 RWS changes a car that demanded commitment to achieve its best into a car that demands commitment and car control - the more the better.

It’s easy to see why the R8 comes as a quattro as standard. It’s built in a land that sees plenty of snow and ice in the course of a year. Countries like Australia don’t suffer much from that, so a big chunk of the 999 R8 V10 RWS models will be coming here. Some of them will even be roofless Spyder versions. But while the standard R8 is undoubtedly faster and easier to drive, the R8 V10 RWS is a better pure driver’s car. It’s that simple.

Shedding the front differential, the driveshafts and the centre differential have seen the R8 lose 50kg of mass. More than pulling the weight down to 1590kg (dry), it also liberates the steering system so that it now has just one job to do – to tell the driver everything that’s happening under the car’s nose.

Sit inside the R8 V10 RWS (Rear Wheel System) and a lot of pieces feel the same as the quattro car. The interior is familiar but carries the '1 of 999’ badge. The incredibly deep, off-beat sound of the V10 is the same and all the control systems are the same. All, that is, except the steering. 

The front wheels don’t have to roll far before it’s obvious to the driver that something significant has changed. There is feel here that was masked before by the steering system’s labours hiding the diff’s contributions. Freed of the quattro’s torque, all it wants to do is talk. Now chats about bumps, about camber, about painted lines, about the tiniest pieces of gravel and even about how hot the tyres are getting. Also startlingly noticeable is how the R8 V10 RWS slides. At will. 

If the driver switches it into Sport mode it will slide a bit, often, and catch it. If the driver switches off the skid-control systems it will slide, a lot, often, and it’s still easy to catch thanks to the R8’s long wheelbase and the revised steering mapping.

While it’s not easy to string together a series of drifted corners into one long slide (because of the polar moment of inertia of the mid-engined layout), it’s a doddle to hurl the R8 into a single corner in second or third gear and bang it through like a rally star.

You don’t need to give it a big throw to get it sliding, either (thanks, again, to its mid-engine layout) and it’s so easy to control beyond its limits that the driver almost feels lazy doing it.

It’s actually easier to do than most people might think, too, though it should only be attempted on closed roads or tracks, obviously. That’s partly because there’s no dedicated ‘drift’ mode, so beloved of modern sports car heroes. There’s just skid-control on, midway (which is the smart option) or off. If it’s off and you slide it, you catch it. Or you spin it. Either way, it’s just you, which is a welcome throwback. 

As ever, the R8’s powertrain feels deliciously like living through something a bit naughty, like it’s an heroically pure, naturally aspirated knight in a world of efficient turbocharged soldiers. 

It has naturally aspirated throttle response, without the lag that comes with turbocharging (and it does, no matter how much turbo advocates argue). That makes controlling the R8 RWS’s more irreverent attitudes that much easier, because it responds to every squeeze of the toe as quickly as if the engine was intuitively connected to it.

It’s not slow, either, with 397kW of power arriving at a raucous 7800rpm, and it’s full of induction roar, chirps and whirrs from the 5.2-litre V10, with its pistons oscillating away at 27 metres per second, just behind the driver’s ear.

It’s power you have to ask for, in a polite way, with lots of revs. While modern turbo motors crank out their best at 2500rpm, the R8 RWS brings its 540Nm of torque to bear at 6500rpm and it all feels beautifully, traditionally linear.

It loses 0.3 seconds to 100km/h compared to the quattro R8, whipping through the mark in 3.7 seconds (or 3.8 as a Spyder), but that’s hardly the point of a car that can hit 320km/h on long straights.

The core of the car is unchanged, with the same mostly-aluminium spaceframe chassis and a hidden chunk of reinforcing carbon-fibre panel across the rear bulkhead and the transmission tunnel.

It retains the suspension layout, right down to the 245/35 R19 front and 295/35 R19 rear tyres (which you’ll want to keep a handy stock of), but loses the magnetic-fluid dampers for fixed-rate dampers. The only significant changes have been to keep the RWS’s more overt tendencies in check, like stiffening the damper rates, giving it more negative rear camber and fitting a stiffer front anti-roll bar.

The thing is, the R8 RWS doesn’t feel demonstrably rear-wheel drive until you ask it to. You could easily drive it every day, with the car happily waiting for the moment you decide to turn it from stylish supercar into a glorious, oversteering odyssey.