The R8 never really suited circuit work. That all changed with the super-rare GT RWD
will lose a couple of cylinders, but gain a brace of turbos and a whole trio of electric motors. Furthermore, Audi is sweetening the deal with a 10,000rpm redline and peak power of 800hp just 1,000rpm shy of it. But of course it does mean that the V10 howl you so often hear bouncing off the buildings in central London won’t be quite as omnipresent as it has been for the last decade or so - especially as the Huracan wasn’t the only car producing that inimitable noise.
While there’s still no word on what the R8 successor will look like - nor whether it might pinch Lambo’s new hybrid V8 or go fully electric - the writing has been on the wall for Audi's V10 supercar for quite some time.
From the outside, it looks like a facelifted version of the hyper rare ‘Performance Parts’, which itself was the closest Audi came to building a GT3-style R8. That’s because it comes with the same aero appendages as the Performance Parts model, including the swan neck rear wing that looks like a scaled-down version of the GT3 race car’s, plus a deeper splitter, skirts and canards front and rear.
As the name suggests, the Performance Parts edition was essentially Audi throwing a smattering of track-focused hardware at the R8 V10 and calling it a day. For the GT RWD, it took a more holistic approach. The run-out model featured adjustable KW coilovers and carbon ceramic disks, and carbon fibre was used for the front anti-roll bar and bucket seats to help shed 20kg. While these weren’t exclusive to the GT, the new Torque Rear drive mode certainly was.
Topping it all off was the 5.2-litre naturally aspirated V10, delivering 620hp where previously there had been 562hp from the RWD. Other changes included the seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox from the pre-particulate filter R8s, which had shorter ratios, while tweaks to the software shortened shift times to even tinier fractions of a second and downshifted at higher revs for a better response on track.
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