The Top Gear car review: Audi RS7

The Audi RS7 is the less sensible sibling of the RS6 Avant. The Audi Sport team have turned their back on traditional saloons (dinky RS3 aside), offering the five-door coupe Sportback models as an alternative alongside more conventional estates, coupes and roadsters.

RS7 mk1 certainly wasn’t an all-time great, so Audi’s gone right back to the drawing board, and convinced the keeper of the company finances to dig deep so that it can swap most of the body panels to endow it with a much wider, burlier look than a regular A7. It’s gained 40mm in width and the makeover is so successful, say the designers, they’ve not had to add a fixed spoiler or the faux vents and grilles that plague even some of their own cars.

It now has five seats rather than four – “important to compete against classic saloons,” says Audi – and you can even use this mk2 RS7 to tow things.

That’s not why most people buy an RS, of course, but worry not. Beneath the skin there have also been big changes. Its 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 produces the same 592bhp as the outgoing RS7 Performance, but there’s more torque as well as a new mild-hybrid system that shaves fuel consumption by allowing the engine to coast over short distances, and the stop/start to kick in from speeds as high as 13mph. The V8 can also switch to a V4 under light throttle loads.

Performance doesn’t suffer, though, with a 3.6sec 0-62mph time and optional 190mph top speed surely more than ample in a car weighing two tonnes. It goes without saying this car is monstrously quick. The engine drives all four wheels through an eight-speed automatic gearbox, with as much as 85 per cent of power sent to the rear axle, though not courtesy of a lightly immature ‘drift mode’ like you’ll find on its BMW M5 and Mercedes-AMG E63 rivals.

The car’s brain shuffles power around to where it’s best utilised, with UK models getting a standard Sport Differential at the back as well as four-wheel steering. Increasingly the norm in fast German stuff – to effectively shrink big performance cars into little ones in corners – Audi’s engineers say the latter massively stems understeer. Understeer being the traditional foe of the big Audi RS saloon, of course. Have they succeeded?