Audi’s sending just 75 RS4 Avant Competitions to the UK

Welcome to the outer reaches of sensibility.

We definitely started sensibly – a mid-sized estate car with the space, tech and badge cachet to blithely breeze through the gauntlet of modern life. Adding speed and visual intrigue might not be the most cerebral way to add some heart to a head-dominated decision, but it works – fast estates, after all, are the single greatest motoring niche in the world.

And who among us will say no to the chance to fire four rings at the horizon at a rate of 80 metres per second, cosplay as track bros by adjusting our coilovers or hear the biturbo hurricane of a 444bhp V6, unmuffled by eight kilos of overstuffed sound deadening?

Well, likely those without £84,600 spare, or at least a particularly solid and steady income to afford the lease payments. Or maybe those who find the Audi RS4 Avant Competition’s price a bridge too far when the regular, £70,000 RS4 Avant still has the 2.9-litre, biturbo V6 with all 444bhp and 443lb ft that the pricier limited edition offers, if not the top speed and spannerable suspension.  

But, much like someone who gets their news from Facebook, there’s very obviously more to the story here. In what an unkind man might call fiddling and a gentler soul might call fettling, Audi’s rejigged the quattro system to favour the rear axle a little more, recalibrated the gearbox for shorter shift times and fine-tuned the engine computer “for tighter load changes in S mode when ‘dynamic’ mode is active”, which... certainly does something.

These small changes – at least the ones we understand – speak to engineers who’ve tested and tweaked their creation and now feel confident saying that this is how the RS4 should be, and should perform. Add in the fact that those coilovers are 10mm lower out of the box (with the ability to drop another 10) and work in concert with stiffer sway bars and springs, you’ve likely gone about as far as you can with this generation of RS4 Avant, and maybe even road-going estates in general.

But that might be the problem.

See, a Swiss Army Knife is a practical ‘everyday carry’ item, which becomes entirely impractical as a daily device when it has 31 different functions and weighs a solid pound. A midsized estate is a similarly practical daily tool, and one that gets progressively less so as price thresholds are exceeded, and as the equilibrium of performance and practicality is unbalanced. Or, you could say, when it reaches the outer limits of sensibility.