I came of age in a car world in decline. I watched the Integra become the RSX and eventually the ILX. I saw the Eclipse waste away. The RX-7 died, the 3000GT died, the Z died, the Supra died, and even Chevrolet couldn't keep the upside-down bathtub it called the Camaro going. Amongst all of these various malaises, I was filled with another deep yearning I still can't quite explain. There was something wrong with Audi.
Welcome to the run-up to Performance Car of the Year 2023. This year we’ll be running breakout stories on each of our 10 contenders twice a week, every week until the full all-out comparison goes live the third week of January. Let's get into it.
It was funny in that I had seen Audi's high point, or at least one of its apexes. At the turn of the Millenium, us Americans got the B5 Audi S4. It weighed around 3384 pounds, it had a 30-valve V-6 with twin turbos, 2.7 liters of displacement and a now-nostalgic 250 horsepower. Quattro all-wheel drive was all you got, though it was up to you if you got an automatic or a six-speed manual. For a long time that car seemed fussy when you could buy a Subaru WRX or Mitsubishi Evo. (How innocent we all were.) Then, for a much longer time, I was left yearning.
The problem was that Audi kept making better and better sports sedans. The once-compact sedan became comfortably midsize, the 30-valve V-6 became a 40-valve V-8, and what had been a somewhat juvenile car became rather adult. It wasn't the loss I felt when cars like the Supra simply disappeared. It was a slow and steady decline I saw play out in real time.
It's not like I envisioned myself driving an S4, and that Audi was denying me this possibility making its car faster and less approachable. I liked the idea of the S4 as a kind of final boss of the sport compacts. The S4 was the fastest sport compact car, the most complicated sport compact car, the most luxurious sport compact car, but it was still a compact car at heart. It was a higher rung of a ladder that started with Hondas and Nissan SE-Rs. As the S4 grew, it lost this connection. As it grew, it lost its charm.
I think Audi knows that it lost something with its central figure. It even ditched the naturally aspirated V-8 to return to a twin-turbo V-6, and it admirably pulled a few hundred pounds out of its most recent generation. But that didn't solve the problem: it had gotten too big.
And then, Audi gave America the RS3! That was it! That's all we needed! A small car with a boosted engine that offers a bit of a dream that we might one day step up to it from our un-boosted little cars, one day maybe even graduate from it to something grander. We got the last-gen RS3 here in America in 2017, and then in late 2021 we got this new 2022 model, on sale in Europe since '20. This one is part of VW's greater MQB architecture, in this case dubbed MQB Evo, so it is to some degree a very fancy Golf. It is also just about as far away on the family tree from the Audi Q6 or the Volkswagen Transporter, though. Take all these comparisons as you may.
In any case, we took this newest RS3 out to Performance Car of the Year and, do you know what? It was great! We all liked it!
The engine is still on that border between normal and strange, this time an inline-five rather than a five-valve-per-cylinder V-6. The sound is great, even if it does come across as somewhat synthesized, and the power is strong and satisfying. The car drives better than any Audi should, too. The engine is transverse, laid side-to-side rather than front-to-back in Audis of old.
We had this thing on track and it was–this might be hard to imagine–fun! Buying a German luxury automobile might be a very serious thing to do, but this particular one does not feel dour behind the wheel. And for such an angry-faced vehicle, it drives with a lot of humor. It is eager to turn, eager to adjust its line. This is not a rocket sled, or a road rocket, or any of the typical Audi stereotypes from the days when iron block engines hung out ahead of the front wheels and resisted every action of the steering wheel. This RS3 is remarkably spry for something that weighs 3639 pounds, a lot for this rather diminutive vehicle.
On the road, it was fast but not just in a straight line. I was happy I got it for one of the twistier sections of our drive through the Catskills and not some highway diversion, or even one of the hairier sections when curtains of rain turned asphalt into glass.
Audi is back to making a desirable small car. Beyond that, we are a few years in to something of a renaissance for sport compact cars in general. You have seen the full roster of cars that came to PCOTY this year. Now joining the RS3 is a turbo AWD Toyota, a turbo AWD Subaru, a turbo front-drive Honda, and a turbo front-drive Hyundai if you don't like any of those. We even got a new turbo Nissan Z to work with, for those who were mourning the glory days of the 300ZX.
I don't know what has gotten into the auto industry, and to Audi in particular, that this kind of car has made a comeback. I grew up in a NorCal college town, meaning I still saw long Audi 5000 Avants lumbering along tree-lined boulevards close to campus. In fact, I remember the house that had two of them in the driveway. And I just double checked on Google street view and two Audi crossovers sit in their place. Audi is not a car company like it used to be. It's an SUV company, at least here in the States. Why some executive decided that, after years of successfully getting us to buy Q8s and SQ5s, it would make sense to federalize their rowdiest compact sedan, I can't say. I'm glad they did.
Road & Track's Deputy Editor who once got a Dakar-winning race truck stuck in a sand dune, and rolled a Baja Bug off an icy New York road, and went flying off Mount Washington in a Nissan 240SX rally car, and...
