We review the new 2022 Audi RS3 and the legendary 5 Cylinder engine. This car can be priced at over $70,000 which is extreme, but its unique performance is in many ways justifiable. We cover the good and the bad, including the technical details of what this car is. We the RS Audi to the track and show off its speed. Other options are VW Golf R, Civic Type R, Subaru STI, Toyota Supra, BMW M2, and Nissan Z.
The audi rs3 you guys have been asking for about a million years and audi finally listened and shipped us a car so in this video we’re going to take it to the track put it up on the left so we can walk you through what they change for this generation rs3 and how it’s different than the golf r so with that enjoy the video foreign before we talk about the
Interior space of the rs3 let’s talk about price this car starts at about sixty thousand dollars the vehicle we are testing with some minimal options like the rs technology package the black optics package and the sports exhaust is about 65 000 once you add all the performance bits like the carbon ceramic brakes you’re looking at about 72 000 which makes this
A very expensive audi and that’s before the dealers get a hold of you and according to some of the viewers dealers are putting like a thirty thousand dollar markup on this car which is absurd the exterior of this car audi has done a reasonable job spicing up you have great color options you have a wide body for the front fenders more aggressive front and rear
Fascias the interior space however is still largely based on an audi a3 which means it’s starting with a mid thirty thousand dollar interior space which according to mark makes us feel like a hyundai that costs 72 000 or 65 000 the plastics don’t feel that expensive however audi’s done a good job with some of the touch points the steering wheel feels good the
Seats these are our spec seats are very comfortable there’s a lot of adjustment they are heated and they do a reasonable less job holding you in on the track the bang olufsen audio system is pretty decent unlike the golf r your hvac controls are physical your drive mode controls are physical and so is your traction control the head unit itself is really easy to use
It connects brilliantly to apple carplay and the gauge cluster is the typical rs designed gauge cluster which means there’s a lot of configurability to it and it’s easy to read and you have a heads up display this being based on a a3 sedan at least here in the us there’s a lot of glass there’s good visibility the receipts are a little tight for full-size adults
But they should serve fine for children and more importantly the rear seats fold down which make this a very practical car and the overall cabin space is pretty quiet with all that out of the way let’s head into the shop foreign rs3 it’s only been like 40 years of us asking for this car and i can’t believe we have one that’s a press car from audi usa and they
Did their best albeit they don’t offer the most technical information they don’t offer technical information but they gave us a little bit a little sprinkle okay so we had to fill in the gaps from our previous knowledge of other cars so let’s start this off this is what been one of the most requested cars and if you’re not an audi enthusiast because if you tell
Somebody oh an rs3 they’re like i don’t know what the hell you’re talking about pretty much outside the audi universe nobody knows what this thing is and please explain to me what this is and why it’s special and all of that five cylinders that’s why it’s special mark this is an expensive car and to a lot of people who like this car they call it like that mini
Gtr because it does 0-60 in the mid threes you have all weather capability and because it’s an audi product it favors the street it’s really comfortable yeah on the highway you can get almost 30 miles a gallon over 80 miles an hour it rides well it’s quiet it’s still a luxury car but if you want to go flat out you can this car is built on the most recent variant
Of mqb so mechanically it’s very similar to the golfer how is it not a golf r if it’s on mqb it has the same subframe most of everything yeah you have the same aluminum subframe it’s still front wheel drive bias it has the same basic torque vector and rear differential but they’ve changed things like suspension tuning if you have the motor you have the gearbox
You have a staggered tire setup this is one of the few cars that i can currently think of that has staggered front and rear tires so the fronts are 265s maximizing mechanical grip in the front with the wide bodied front fenders 245 rear and all of these suspension changes the increased performance from the five cylinder make this currently one of the fastest
Subcompact cars in the world it lapped the ring in like two sorry 740 240 740 which is i know three seconds faster than the current generation ctr okay so i’m going to counter you with that and i i understand when you talk about this car the other thing i always hear is oh man you can tune the hell out of this you can get 6 000 horsepower people talk about it
From the aftermarket perspective but if you’re not doing that here’s the thing this is based on a front wheel drive architecture okay so and then they add on all-wheel drive or you know an all-wheel drive system to kind of balance that that out so if you’re a performance car enthusiast usually you’re going to come from some higher horsepower rear-wheel drive
Car and i know you said the first same thing that i hear a lot is we’re on the track jack’s going through a corner he’s got his foot and it’s understeering he’s like oh why isn’t it turning in and he doesn’t take his foot off because you’re expecting it to over steer out from there in every other car that i like yeah we just did the z the supra the m3 when
You give it throttle you can adjust the eye of the car so as it’s not turning and starting to understeer give it a boot full of gas the nose will come in so but what you have to do with this car is drive it like a front-wheel drive car so once you reach under steer and it’s not correcting you’re gonna go off the track until you lift off so this is not despite
It being able to transfer torque to the back it’s not going to behave like a rear-wheel drive car and that’s going to rule it out for a lot of people however if you’ve come from things like the civic type r the golf r higher hot higher horsepower front wheel drive cars you’re going to get in this a gti even like a subaru a wrx there’s similarities in terms of
Drivability and you may love the driving dynamics of this so that’s the counterpoint let’s talk about the all-wheel drive system okay it’s open diff front just like you got in a golf r with torque vectoring by brake for the front wheels it will then send up to 50 of the torque that is available that the engine is making to the rear wheels through a clutch-based
Torque vectoring differential and of that 50 of the available torque that’s being sent to the rear wheels will send up to a hundred percent of that torque to either the left or right wheel helping to basically induce a yaw moment in the car to help eliminate some of the understeer and that’s all based on drive modes obviously if you’re in comfort mode it will
Put this mostly as front-wheel drive and give you the softest suspension setting the easiest dual clutch automatic setting and then when you go up to rs performance mode or the dynamic mode it will favor trying to neutralize under steer out and give you a little bit more balanced driving now in terms of the rear differential they call it a torque splitter it’s
A torque vectoring differential and it is heavy that’s partly why this car weighs a lot 3 600 pounds and it’s basically 60 40. 60 40 and the cross balance is right right around like 52 which is pretty average but every single hang on panel on this car is steel except for the hood so it’s a heavy car now back to the torque vectoring differential on the back the
Way that it works is the ecu decides you know all the yaw moments input steering wheel angle sensor all that and there are two actuators on the rear differential that control a worm gear and that worm gear is connected to both sides to a gear set and it can open and close the clutches on each side so it’s really quick to do that and that’s how it’s able to either
Lock a clutch on the right or lock a clutch on the left or slip each one to give you that kind of rear wheel drive effect it’s a very dynamic car even though it is front wheel drive biased it feels very lively if you understand how to drive this thing so there’s other elements to the drive system jack so tell me about it so the quickly i want to touch on this
As well there’s like a drift mode they call it like torque rear mode it’s supposed to allow you to overseer the car again it does not oversteer like an m3 it’ll power slide a little bit particularly if you upset the weight balance of the car or you’re carrying a lot of speed this car has the same vehicle dynamics manager that basically the golf r has which it
Can talk or send messages to all the individual corners of this vehicle they’ve gone away from magnetic ride dampers and they’ve gone to a more additional monroe damper that is several different modes when compared to the s3 this car is half an inch lower and when compared to the a3 it’s a full inch lower i can’t tell you what the spring rates are because audi
Doesn’t provide that information and audi’s just going to tell you the marketing stuff again like oh it’s all our rs specific stuff which means they’ve changed dampers spring rates sway bars bushings all the traditional performance stuff and the shocks and the way that the shocks interact are all interconnected with the ecu that controls all of these functions
We talked about it on the golf r it’s the same thing here it’s just audi’s programming of it and that’s how they differentiate this from the golf r but it still has the same steel lower control arms it has aluminum knuckles the front subframes aluminum which again is more rigid than steel and lighter rear subframe is steel and the lower arms are steel as well
Okay so last thing to talk about at least in underneath aside from the cooling obviously this has a different fascia on the front there’s an intercooler there’s coolers to manage the five cylinder because you’re packing a lot more heat in there with the dual clutch so they do manage the cooling there and even in the software side on on the inside of the car you
Can see what the temperatures are so you can manage your driving and your times of how long you’re going to be driving this on track but the big change here is also breaks what do they do jack so you have a single piston rear regardless if you go with the steels or carbon ceramics the steels are enormous i think they’re like 375 or 385 millimeters they’re big
They’re six pistons but if you go with like the dynamics package which increases top speed add some carbon fibery bits you can go with carbon ceramics which reduce unsprung mass and have higher thermal capacity but because this is a german car with carbon ceramics i’m sure like 10 grand to replace in the front yeah you’re taking a sixty thousand dollar car and
Then turning into a fifteen thousand dollar brake job it’s not smart unless you’re really just cruising around they will last forever if you’re not hard and they don’t dust and they don’t dust the steels are the option for somebody that is going crazy however as we found they’re using the older cross drilled rotors which as you can see from these videos the pad
Buildup inside the holes is so extreme that they’ve overflowed and created smearing from the pad material that’s come out and it creates an unnatural or uneven petal feel and vibration in the front discs when you’re driving hard five-cylinder engine largely unchanged mechanically from the prior generation rs3 they’ve basically had the torque come in earlier to
Give it a more peppy feel it makes slightly more power 7-speak dual clutch is amazing to use car makes over 400 horsepower yeah we get more horsepower in the us and they dump the particulate filter so it sounds a little bit more aggressive but i’m curious to really see how this sounds on track jack all right mark so with that let’s head to autobahn country club
Foreign audubon country club on the south circuit this is worst case scenario for this car doesn’t have the carbon ceramics and it doesn’t have the ultra sticky tires laughs and my biggest fear in life is under seriously i know jack doesn’t understand understeer so the the funny part about this car is like you’re like oh it’s it’s gripping it’s gripping it’s not
The front end goes and you lift and then the rear starts to rotate but you know what jack you know my favorite part about this car is what oh my god does this engine sound amazing people like oh man you got to try the the five cylinder and i’m like oh whatever and then you get out here i’m like man this is a it just sounds so good i don’t it’s got this like low
Rumble to it it’s like three cylindery but i don’t know man i i like the dynamics of this car yes it definitely has the the typical audi kind of understeeriness but stand what the all-wheel drive system is doing you can account for it like here you could start to feel the car like starting to rotate through which is really helpful but if you ramrod this thing
Into a corner like any and you’re too hard on the throttle it won’t get in and it’ll understeer too much that’s about it that’s about the only complaint i have and for how well this car seems to ride on the street all things considered but that this isn’t some like 200 000 super sedan it has really good body control out here too oh man i i you know again people
Like oh man this thing’s awesome you gotta drive and i just always been kind of lukewarming like how good can it be and we know the golf are oh it’s just it’s such a joy to drive i mean it’s amazing honestly i wish it was real we’ll try divorce but there’s this as a street car right as something that you’re gonna drive every day it’s super safe super approachable
And it’s super usable once you get used to it i mean this is a car you could you really drive every day and enjoy how how is the how does the the gearbox feel on track and how are the brakes uh the gearboxes really responsive i’m surprised and it does hold rubs which typical audi products don’t it’s always like auto upshifting for you so you get great control
The gearbox is really really fast as you would expect and um the brakes you know we’re not out here running full sessions but the steels do a great job i think just with a really good aggressive track pad it would be zero issue within this car with the right fluid so mark i think now that we’ve covered everything the street dynamics the track dynamics it’s time
For us to head on the final thoughts all right here off the road i’ll unders throughout the road for you boy yeah oh i don’t like the way that i feel final thoughts on the audi rs3 huge thanks to audubon country club and our audi reps so what about the car well this is a expensive product for someone who loves audis and really wants to drive a five-cylinder
Car but they also prioritize the performance behind this vehicle it is blisteringly fast so you’re at a 6c in the mid threes it still returns good fuel economy and with the all-wheel drive system it’s a great street car you can do that launch all day long it’s good in bad weather and it’s really really comfortable and the reality is for most people a front-wheel
Drive architecture isn’t a bad thing think about it how many people do you know power slide through intersections besides marked and mean other people who like rear-wheel drive cars but for most people it doesn’t matter the one thing i will say about this car though is it does make some compromises really this is a seventy thousand dollar car and the interior
Space is not seventy thousand dollars worth and if you compare it to some other performance cars like the ct4v black wing you get a rear wheel drive car with a lot of this car’s performance with a manual gearbox that said it’s still a brilliant car and i know why a lot of people love this thing thanks for watching i hope to see you soon
Transcribed from video
Audi RS3 | Amazing Engine, Normal Car By savagegeese
