Road Test
Audi S3
Test date 14 February 2007
Price as tested £27,000
For Real-world performance, fine ride and handling, desirability, economy
AgainstExpensive, exterior is a little too plain
Audi has been on a roll of late, what with the excellent new TT, the fine-to-drive RS4 and the downright delicious R8.
But spare a moment for the way it once was at Ingolstadt. Not so long ago, the first-generation S3 stood alone as the one genuinely good car to drive in Audi’s range. And that was less than three years ago.
What the original S3 did that no other Audi could replicate at the time was deliver a full and complete package of abilities to its intended audience. It looked good, went well, handled tidily and had a very smart interior. And all for only a small premium above its more mainstream competition.
Except in reality it had almost no competition. At the time there were no other high-quality, high-performance four-wheel-drive hatchbacks on the market. The EvoBishi brigade bought Subarus and Evos, the rest of the market bought S3s, and there was virtually no crossover between the two. Audi had a niche in the market all to itself.
Amazingly, and despite the S3 selling in consistently big numbers since its birth in 1999, that’s still the case with the all-new car today. At £26,975, the latest S3 has virtually no obvious rivals apart from those within VW’s own stable, most notably the £24,240 Golf R32. Considering the S3 is turbocharged, very obviously faster and more dynamic to drive, not to mention considerably further up the tree in terms of prestige, the R32 is hardly what you’d call stiff competition.
The one area in which the R32 could be deemed to be superior to the S3 is in the engine bay. It uses VW’s 3.2-litre V6, whereas the S3 makes do with nothing more than a more powerful version of the four-cylinder direct-injection turbocharged engine found in the Golf GTi. However, do not for one moment think the S3 is a poor relation in this respect. In fact, it uses the four-cylinder turbo engine because extracting more power from the V6 was simply not possible without going to vast expense.
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