Blitzkrieg: Audi RS5 Sportback Driving Impression

Three years ago, I had an opportunity to review the Audi RS5 for a leading men’s magazine. Along with its younger brother, the S5, the RS5 remains one of my most favourite Audis ever. So, here’s the article I wrote about the RS5, back in 2021

Audi is making a bunch of truly phenomenal cars these days. And that’s causing me some grief. No, not the cars themselves, of course. The problem is with the reviews I end up writing, which tend to go a bit overboard with praise for the cars’ performance. Take the last Audi I drove – the S5 – which made me fall deeply in love with its screaming, rasping, turbocharged V6, intense acceleration and terrific handling. Predictably enough, I wrote a rather glowing review, which was subsequently accused by the Editor [of the magazine for which I wrote the review] of being ‘gushing’ and ‘breathless.’ Oh, the shame!

Audi S5: Firecracker

The Audi S5, one of the most memorable cars I've ever driven

Having worked as an automotive journalist for around two decades, I’ve lost count of the number of cars I’ve had the opportunity to drive over the last 20-25 years. But of those, a few cars stand head and shoulders above the rest. Those few cars were truly spectacular, truly memorable. With most cars that I drove / reviewed as a journalist, it was business as usual. You get in, do your driving, testing etc., the car goes back to its manufacturer, you write your story and move on. But with some rare, few cars that were truly memorable, things were different. When I got out of such cars, the only emotion was, ‘Oh my god!! I wish I could somehow afford to buy this thing!’ Deep in my heart, I knew that would probably never happen and I’d never get to drive that particular car again, but that hasn’t stopped me from continuing to dream about it. One such car was the Audi S5, which I drove in 2021 for a review that I did for Man’s World magazine. This is the article I wrote:

A nuclear reactor is, for most people, a bit intimidating. Inscrutable for the most part, with its inner workings not understood by the vast majority, a nuclear reactor houses controlled nuclear fission – a process that unleashes vast amounts of energy via the splitting of atoms. Controlled and harnessed in an orderly fashion, nuclear energy can power entire cities. Nuclear propulsion has also been used to power submarines for many decades and scientists propose that interplanetary spacecraft might, someday, use nuclear power. In the late-1950s, some car manufacturers were also dreaming up nuclear-powered concept cars; witness the rather outlandish Ford Nucleon, the Studebaker Packard Astral and the Simca Fulgur, all of which were supposed to eschew the poor old internal combustion engine in favour of putting a miniaturised nuclear reactor under the hood.