The road trip

It’s all about the journey.

Some experiences are made to be savoured. The 'right' stretch of road in the new Audi TT Roadster is a perfect example.

6 November, 2015

The outside in

If Victoria’s very winding Great Ocean Road was magically straightened, the new TT Roadster could knock over entire 243km trip in a tick under an hour.

Even taking magic into account, that’s very quickly indeed. But it would be a waste, and not just – at the Roadster’s electronically limited 250km/h top speed – of your licence. Open-top touring rarely gets better than on this glorious ribbon of bitumen. In one of the world’s most beautiful rag-tops, the Great Ocean Road’s magnificence climbs into the car with you.

Which means you want to savour the experience, not hurry it along.

Then there’s the matter of those bends. Compact, quick and sporty, the TT is an enthusiastic partner as we bound southwest of Lorne, hoovering up hairpins and sweeping turns alike. Straightening out the twists, whether magically or not, would be criminal.

“Are you cold?” bellows my driving partner, whose name is Phil. Phil’s carefully coiffed ’80s televangelist hair is wafting lightly in the breeze; it’s the reason he’d shunned a beanie, even though it’s a crisp 12 degrees. Phil had immediately jabbed the button for the electrically operated wind deflector.

“No,” I shout. “Turn the neck heater on – it’s great.” It’s winter in Victoria, a state where ticking this option on our S-Line model is a no-brainer. Integrated into the seat, it has three settings. Phil selects full power.

“Oh,” he yells. “Right!”

“Why are we yelling?” I yell.

“Because,” he hollers, before dropping to a more civilised tone. “… oh! Well. Yes. Nice one.”

We’d been yelling because in a roadster, barrelling along exposed to the Victorian winter sun and the open sweep of the sky, it feels like you should be yelling. But you don’t. Exterior wind buffeting is so minimised by clever aerodynamics that discussion can continue, like golf commentary, in a low, familiar burble. (The same is true of Bluetooth telephone conversations, whereby clever microphone pick-ups integrated into the seat belt make chatting simple, no matter the speed limit).

The way driving was meant to be

The Great Ocean Road was built between 1919 and 1932, by servicemen returned from the Great War, and is dedicated to the fallen. Beginning in the surfing hub of Torquay, near the famous Bells Beach, the road – the world’s largest war memorial – hugs the Surf Coast to Port Otway, then tilts westward along the Shipwreck Coast all the way to the Twelve Apostles. It finishes at Allansford.

Like an Australian Big Sur, it’s is dotted with lookouts, and also road signs reminding foreign tourists that we ‘DRIVE ON LEFT IN AUSTRALIA’. At any rate, frequent stopping is the norm, and not just at Timboon, north of Port Campbell and the region’s gourmet hub (think cheeses, whiskey, artisanal ice cream and honey). From Torquay’s Scorched to Warrnambool’s Pickled Pig, top restaurant food is the norm – with killer cafes, good pubs and proper Aussie pie shops in between.

Dynamically, it takes very few bends to realise that the TT Roadster has made great strides entering its third generation. The new quattro permanent all-wheel drive system is armed with a quicksilver torque vectoring set-up, able to send up to 100 per cent of power to the back wheels. That superbly rigid chassis helps get its 169kW to the road, a fizzing 370Nm of torque superbly directed via a six-speed dual-clutch S ironic transmission.

The result, in those aforementioned bends, is genuine enthusiasm. From dip to dale, its claws emerge at will as the Roadster slices up one apex after another. In a genuinely impressive achievement, this iteration of the classic open-top simply refuses all understeer. It’s the TT all grown up. It has a dynamic maturity best appreciated when slipping the Drive Select into ‘Sport’ mode, tap-tap-tapping the manual gear paddles and springing hungrily out of tight corners.

An automotive icon

Automotive icons don’t often come along, so it makes sense that carmakers treat theirs with kid gloves: each evolutionary step plotted forensically, each refinement painstakingly determined. But when the original TT came along in 1998 – immediately setting a new design benchmark – less than a year had passed before a roadster version joined it on the road. And having lost none of the coupe’s charm in the switch from tin lid to a folding fabric.

Yet the seamlessness of the coupe and roadster’s design language made sense. At the designer’s easel, the convertible version was actually sketched first. These closest of siblings have remained in impressive lockstep ever since – and both retain their icon status.

A status due equally to the Great Ocean Road. The men who returned from WWI to build Australia’s seaside strip took 13 years to complete its 243km. That’s an average speed of just 213cm/h… which is, eh, not bad, considering they also stopped to sample the area’s providence. In 1924, workers took two straight weeks off after 500 barrels of beer and 120 spirits washed ashore from the steamboat Casino, run aground on Cape Patton.

They had the right idea. Down here, it’s not a matter of how quickly you could get to the end, but how much you’re enjoying the journey. On the Great Ocean Road, getting there truly is half the fun.

Slide 1 of 4

The road trip

It’s all about the journey.

The outside in

The way driving was meant to be

An automotive icon

New Audi Q5 – First look

Designing the new A5

Design evolution

New electric era begins