Is he serious?!
"Okay, sounds good," I reply.
A quick downshift into second gear and a dab of the touchy 15-inch carbon ceramics turns our slow pace into a near crawl. The wrist slap lasts only seconds, though. A short uphill straight resides ahead, and my urge to go faster can't be ignored.
My right foot lowers to send the 408-horsepower turbocharged inline-five cylinder heart past 4000 rpm, and the mill immediately responds with the deep, offbeat rumble only a healthy straight-five can make. Every sound echoes through the barren carbon-fiber cocoon. With each lull between gear changes comes a delicious WRC-like WHOOOOOSH!!!! from the wastegate. Upshifting shoves us back into the carbon-fiber buckets as torque and speed increase.
"Please! Please! Again, slow down," my German-born passenger says, now annoyed at my blistering 42-mph run.
Peter isn't afraid of speed. As one of the lead creators of the last two RS 6 models (the ones packing around 500 hp), he knows speed well. He is, however, afraid that I'll turn his latest pride and joy into another inanimate object. It's completely understandable -- the car is unofficially valued at more than $5.2 million.
But the quattro Concept represents much more than an ueber-hefty price tag. Its existence is a celebration of the original Sport Quattro's 30th birthday. If you missed class, the Sport Quattro was a limited production, stripped-out, purpose-built, barely-streetable road car that demonstrated the cunningness of all-wheel drive outside of the era's usual SUV or truck applications. If it wasn't for the Sport Quattro and the tedious research and development behind it, many road cars, not to mention racecars (hence the WRC-esque wastegate), would be quite different today.
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