The brand that made its name with all-wheel drive cars could make its new name stand out at last by ditching it. The rear-drive version of the R8 is a gem, an emotion-rich, lively bundle of raucous throttle response and agile handling. For anybody living in a sunny country, it loses nothing to the quattro versions and backs that up by costing less money. Anybody who loves driving will love this when it arrives in SA in the fourth quarter of 2018. This is the car Audi’s quattro division changed its name to build. And everybody saw it coming. Stefan Winkelmann, the then Audi Sport boss, knew this playbook. He’d done the same thing to the Gallardo and then the Huracan when he was president of Lamborghini, after all, and the current R8 is effectively a Huracan underneath its skin. So, it wasn’t too exacting a task in pure engineering terms, but the top end of Audi town took some convincing to dump the quattro GmbH tag its go-fast division was born with. Quattro had never built a rear-wh...
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