Wild Thing

Tasmania. A place of indescribable beauty, rich in nature’s bounty and home to the best driving roads in Australia. The Apple Isle is also home to the aptly-named Tasmanian Devil, an aggressive carnivore and apex predator, whose diminutive size and appearance belies its ferocious demeanour that has seen it very much rule the roost on the island since the Tasmanian Tiger became extinct. That is until now. 

Meet the Audi RS 3 Sportback: the perfect car for Australia’s most perfect roads, and the new king of the Apple Isle. Apart from the occasional autobahn bomber, it’s rare for a production car to be built with a particular piece of roadway in mind. That doesn’t stop this hottest of hatches, conceived 16,500 kilometres away in Ingolstadt, Germany, from being the perfect car for Tasmania’s thrilling ribbon of roads that twist through mile after mile of the most captivating countryside in the south.

On these roads, the RS 3’s still-unmatched, ever-improving quattro permanent all-wheel drive and superlative power-to-weight ratio are a sublime combination. The prestigious rally pedigree of that five-cylinder engine – winner of six consecutive international engine of the year awards – is in its element. Many of these are, after all, Targa roads and the five-cylinder’s engine note appears designed to reverberate around Tasmania’s steep gorges. The hoarseness of its bark is untempered as the model enters its second generation.

Heading south and avoiding the coast, we burst through Poatina towards Great Lake. The jewel of this leg is arguably Poatina Road, a silly-string stretch of the B51 that’s twistier than an M. Night Shyamalan box-set. This isn’t the piebald, lunar landscape of Queenstown, due west, where another of the Apple Isle’s driver’s dream roads pinballs thrillingly through mine-scarred hills. Rather, it’s an often thickly wooded series of switchbacks rising to Tasmania’s Central Plateau: all tightening hairpins, sweeping bends and torque-testing dips, interspersed by a couple of sweet, clean esses. Some wet. Others, as the altitude increases, drier.  And all grist for the RS 3’s mill.

The 1520kg RS 3 Sportback generates 270kW, with a 465Nm maximum torque figure that stretches all the way from 1625-5550rpm. That produces a 0-100km/h time of just 4.3 seconds – a respectable effort for supercars just a decade or so gone – but it’s not the whole story. 

The Sportback’s disdain for showy styling belies a hedonist’s hunger for full-tilt performance. For all of the RS 3’s emotive crackle and pop, few drivers’ aids have ever transformed average Joes into wheelmen like quattro. With unerring balance, surging on that resilient berm of torque, the car seems less to attack than to pour itself into corners, squirting through in an all-wheel blast of enthusiasm and grip. Quicksilver electronics allow little leeway to understeer, each springy exit an invitation to dive headlong into the next. Speed-sensitive steering is satisfyingly weighted and exceptionally quick, with just 2.13 turns lock-to-lock, minimising mid-corner hand jive. The RS 3 Sportback’s Catalunya red is new and exclusive to this model, and up in the high country, it swoops past in a hi-fi blur of spindrift and foliage, as bright as a beacon against the day’s grim greens and greys. 

The crisp, drying, honeyed Taswegian air, pricked with cloudbursts on a cobalt sky and ringing with birdsong, is breathtaking. It mostly smells like brakes.

On performance alone, the RS 3’s reputation as the world’s best hot hatch is hard to fault. Yet, slipping down off the plateau and on the long, varied run to Hobart, it’s the RS 3’s manners under more sedate driving conditions that ensure it the crown. 

Most cars capable of genuinely world-class attack are compromised by an inability to work as a daily driver. They’re too fussy on over-sized alloys, harsh over the tiniest corrugation, burdened by overly Spartan interiors. Not the RS 3 Sportback. This is a genuine superstar that is just as capable of normality as of lunacy. Thrown at twisty roads, it has little truck with impulse control. Ease off and it happily embraces the quiet life.

The RS 3 Sportback’s gift is revealing as much beauty in drama or action as it does in the gentle ensemble piece. It’s the perfect car for the country’s most perfect roads. And the other ones, too.