Top Gear

Started by ja, March 23, 2005, 07:46:06 PM

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ja

Thought this was interesting.

Lifted from a post on the audifans.com ur quattro list:


James Bufkin wrote:

I got a call from John Hanlon this afternoon.
We talked for awhile on various rally car topics.  I then asked him about the Top Gear Video; although this wasn't the purpose of his call, He told me everything and was willing to let me relay this to the Quattro community.

Regarding the Top Gear show that pitted Old competition cars against Modern Road Cars.
Audi UK contacted John to do a head to head drive at Dunsfold where Top Gear does their shows.
The plan was to put a A2 Quattro up against an RS6 Avant+.  The RS6 Avant plus is a 500 horsepower avant station wagon with some 100 lbs of weight shaved off by using some lightweight body panels.   John's A2 is a 10V 5 cylinder rally car with a K27 turbo.   It does have the Magnesium suspension, but it was setup for rally racing with the only tarmac change being street tires on the wheels.   Basically John was the 2nd car up on track after the Noble had run a 1:27 second lap.  John had 8 practice laps and his subsequent best time in his A2 was 1:29.5 seconds.  Keep in mind this was the 1st time John was on this track.   Stig drove the RS6 Avant+ and turned a 1:30.7 second lap.  The brakes on the RS6 where literally smoking and the engine was overheating.   What is interesting is that John said he was on his practice engine and was gear limited to 105 mph.   I don't know Dunsfold track at all, but it turned out that the RS6 being beat by 1 second was not going to fly with either Audi UK or TopGear.   Funny anecdote, When Stig got out of the RS6 he said to John "they'll never air it".   Because the RS6 was practically on fire or because the 25 year old Quattro beat the best street car Audi had by 1 second.?    Either way, John wasn't terribly upset, but what happened next was just plain inexcusable.

Top Gear decided to run Stig in an Evo.  The Evo wasn't present during the head to head and for all we know might of had advantage in weather or whatever fancies them.  And to top it off, they aired footage of John's warmup laps and did NOT use his best lap time, so that the result would be more suitable for the intention of the program.    The pitch and roll on the urquattro through much of the video doesn't indicate the hard launch the quattro would have being 500 lbs lighter with more power yet the Evo reaches turn one 1st.  That just not right.     Keep in mind the Timed lap was not from a standing start, it was the best lap time of the eight that were run, so you know the video footage that followed the video was bullcrap.   BTW, everything else in the Top Gear video was correct.  There was a Ford rally car there, a modern Ford, the GT40 and the Noble.   So it should have been 2 for the Competition cars and only 1 for the Modern Street Cars that day.   I do fancy that the A2 can take an EVO if setup to do so.

James Bufkin


Anyone actually see the episode in question?

MRVR6

Yep, i think i saw it. They didn't do head to head though. I remembered (if I'm not mistaken) is that they just show video footage of the race and then Jeremy claimed that EVO was faster by 1 second or so. I guess there;s a thread that discuss it here in VASK.

bsting

On Auto motor & Sport TV few years ago - footage of RS6 catching fire at 200kph+ hammering around Nardo at 2am.

Mike

Very disappointing if true.

The footage was shown split screen with the quattro shown doing a lap on one half of the screen and the evo doing its thing on the other.

The 5-cylinder engine at full chat sounded fantastic - much better than the boring drone of the evo.

The evo is much closer to being a competition car than a RS6, focus RS or whatever.