Three weeks ago something inside me felt as though it may have broken. Something visceral, in the literal sense.
It happened on the launch event of the very capable new Audi E-tron GT. And it wasn’t a result of dinner – often the scene of plutocratic, manufacturer-underwritten expansiveness but which here consisted of a burger van laid up in a dimly lit car park outside Heilbronn. If anything, that made it all nicely familiar – a bit like being on a group test in Wales but in a parallel corporate universe.
Whatever it was that broke, it happened as a consequence of Carsten Jablonowski pointing the most comically over-endowed RS Audi since the Quattro S1 E2 down a damp slope and popping off a launch-control start.
It wasn’t an especially clean start, but considering the slickness of the surface underwheel, it was still frighteningly effective – and with 912bhp on tap, neither was it slow.
As if to goad less mature owners into using the launch-control feature at any opportunity, a stopwatch can be called up in the instrument binnacle. It read 2.8sec for 0-100kph – not slow but not exactly supersonic by today’s standards either.
And yet I felt like I’d just downed two steins of the local brew then pegged it up three flights of stairs while wearing a corset and a respirator. I was at that moment unexpectedly wrecked. Jablonowski – wiry, laconic and every bit chassis engineering’s answer to Clint Eastwood – looked at me, his face wearing the veneer of a smirk in which I detected traces of guilt. I should hope so.
Two things stood out. First, the uneasy and lingering sensation that one of my vertebrae had nicked an artery on the back of my liver. This persisted for a couple of hours.
I’ve never had anything like that before, despite being flung around race tracks by Frank Biela and Walter Röhrl (in fairness, both men were indescribably economical at the helm) and through a seven-foot snow bank then down into a Finnish forest by an apologetic Bentley engineer (less smooth).
The odd pulled muscle and bruised rib? Sure. The feeling that something anatomically a little untoward had just happened? Never – until now.
The second thing was the double whammy of faint vertigo and the sense of the stomach in freefall, either of which can be desirable in a performance car if delivered to just the right magnitude. Not so here: too much of both.
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If it really does this to your body's internals then it's not fun then knowing your going to fe like this every time you mash the pedal into the carpet is it?, this alone would decide wether I bought one or not.