Audi TT RS Fast Fleet test – 13,000 miles in Ingolstadt's extinct sports car

Fourteen months. Props to Audi for letting us run a car for that long, allowing us to really get to know it, to get well beyond the honeymoon stage, to experience it through four seasons and in all the various scenarios that crop up throughout a year (or more) of motoring. That's confidence in your product right there.

KY22 LVE arrived way back in the summer of 2022, with just 60 miles on the clock, and was fully loaded in terms of its spec. Vorsprung trim added 20-inch wheels, Magnetic Ride dampers, the RS Sports Exhaust system, Matrix LED headlights and a black styling pack. This was topped up with Tango Red Metallic paint (£575), red brake calipers (£345) and an extended RS styling pack (£1125) that added red outer side panels on the seats, red trim on the transmission tunnel, red rings in the air vents and red stripes on the seat belts. Altogether this made it a £71,495 car in 2022, although at the time you could get into a basic-spec Audi TT RS for £59,450.

Early impressions included how sharp the Mk3 TT still looks, despite having been around since 2014, albeit lightly facelifted in 2019. This was reinforced over the coming months by the impressive number of positive comments, thumbs up and the like that the car received. There was clearly plenty of love for LVE.

The interior design had aged well, too. The black theme was lifted by those flashes of flashy red, while the ‘Virtual Cockpit’ instrument panel behind the steering wheel meant a central screen could be dispensed with (and was never missed by driver or passengers). In its place was a row of three jet-engine-style air vents, each with a miniature display showing HVAC information inside a central rotary control, the knurled edges of which made them a delight to operate and imparted a sense of quality that spread throughout almost all of the cockpit. Try that with a touchscreen.

When the running-in miles were completed, the RS’s defining attribute could come fully into play: its 2.5-litre turbocharged five-cylinder engine, that it shares wit the Audi RS3. With 396bhp and 354lb ft, which was almost always deployable thanks to the quattro four-wheel drive, it really could dish out some monster performance. Think 0-62mph in 3.5sec, according to our timing gear on another TT RS a few years ago. Never did I tire of the car’s ability to fire out of a corner all guns blazing, suck up an inviting straight at fast-forward pace, or whip past a B-road dawdler in an instant.

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I was a little less impressed with its sound. Even with the optional exhaust the noise inside the car was more often a warm drone than the anticipated five-cylinder warble. Occasionally I pondered if a similarly powerful four-cylinder – à la Mercedes-AMG A45 S – might do the job just as well, while most likely being lighter too. But drop the window while rattling off a gear or two through a tunnel or alongside a high wall and there were reassuring echoes of ’80s Quattro rally cars to be detected.

If one area of the TT RS could be accused of showing its age, it’s the gearbox. On a couple of occasions I caught myself describing it to people as ‘an auto’ when more specifically it’s a dual-clutch unit. Compared to many more recent transmissions its shifts aren’t the snappiest, although to be fair it was only when getting back into the RS after driving something else that this was brought into focus.

Drive only the Audi for a few days and you soon get tuned in, almost subconsciously adjusting your expectations slightly, and fine-tuning your requests for manual gearchanges to suit. The latter were best performed using the +/- plane of the central gearshifter rather than the paddles – something I never normally do, but the RS’s wheel-mounted paddles, while a decent size, made a horrible hollow, cheap, plasticky click every time you pulled one. They were a complete mismatch for all those other expensive-feeling touchpoints in the car.

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Practicality-wise, the TT was a doddle to live with. The seats were both comfortable and supportive (aided by adjustable upper side bolsters), while the ‘plus two’ arrangement meant you never had to worry about if there would be enough space for your luggage. On longer journeys 35mpg could be achieved without trying, while our overall average of 28.3 seems more than respectable given the performance on offer and how frequently it was exploited. Only the tough ride quality took the shine off prolonged stints at the wheel, the adaptive dampers’ Comfort setting too often feeling like something of a misnomer.

At the end of our time with the car its first service was still 5700 miles away, so there were no costs there, although a new 20-inch wheel was required after one of the originals got beaten up by a pothole. While they were swapping that, Audi’s press office also chose to refresh the rear brakes and fit four new tyres too, although as a typical owner you could’ve eked out these consumables for a few thousand more miles. On the subject of tyres, the rears wore almost twice as quick as the fronts, proving the Haldex 4WD system wasn’t shy about sending torque to the rear of the car.

During its lengthy stay at evo, the strengths of the TT RS really come to the fore: a super-secure chassis, effortless pace, strong practicality, high quality. Its combination of these elements and more enabled the TT RS to carve its own niche in its class, making it different from your Caymans and Alpines and M2s. Or at least, they did, for the TT has now departed the Audi lineup after a 25 year stint.  The coupe world is a poorer place without it.

This story was first featured in evo issue 316.