Guilty Pleasure
As the piece probably hints, I was offered this beauty to drive and too greedy to say no, despite the fact that Alpha‘s target market was way too mid-range for it. Thank God the editor agreed to print it. Kevin Rudd was the Prime Minister in 2009 and a “seppo” is an American. You can work out the tortured rhyming slang yourself.
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This is wrong. It’s just so wrong. Before I start in on the usual guff about engine this and torque that; before I even dare mention white leather bucket seats and alloy wheels, I should just apologise now. If you want to know about a sensibly priced sports car, go back a page, where my colleague Aaron, a less greedy, more economic climate controlled man than me, offers you the Mazda RX-8. If you want to know about some bloke having a drive in dreamland, read on.
Nice car, that Mazda: bit of fun, good performance, and the wife won’t stab you for buying it. No harm done. The Audi A5, though, I actually had to lie about. When the editor asked how much a luxury German sports car might be, I said “about $90,000”. Nonsense. The Audi S5 4.2 FSI Quattro tiptronic will set you back $138,000. Only it won’t, because you can’t afford it. I can’t afford it. I just wanted a go in it.
For a hundred and thirty thousand bucks plus, you get a car people actually turn their heads to look at. Perfectly normal men, minding their own business by staring at a girl down the street with a big chest, would look at my S5, instead. I took it to a Barbie and friends stood around it saying, “Rev the engine again” and, “Is it really only 90 grand?” Once, when parked in a posh area of Sydney, a seppo waiting for my spot shouted “Nice car” out the window of his own, inferior, sports car. I’d come back to it and people would be peering in through the windows.
The experience of driving the S5 is like eating a third pie for lunch: 10 per cent guilt and 90 per cent pleasure. Part of me feels that I might as well be running down the street waving burning $50 notes in the air. The rest of me is sitting in a white leather bucket seat, caressing the wheel, nurdling the tiptronic gears and frightening the heck out of myself with the occasional burst of warping acceleration.
You can’t do it too often, because the police don’t like it, but give the accelerator a real poke and those eight cylinders wake up and shout. It does 0-100km/h in 5.1 seconds.
Audi comes from a big country with fast roads, and they want drivers to travel it in roomy style; and not just you, but three happy passengers, as you navigate sweeping bends with an orgasmic smile on your face. And those passengers are presented with zoned airconditioning, a top-of-the-range sound system and power-controlled seating!
OK, look. By the time you read this, Kevin Rudd will have given us each about $900 of your own taxes back to stimulate the economy with. If you and 154 of your best MySpace friends get together, this could happen.
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