More $$$ Than a 911 Turbo? -- 2025 Audi RS6 Avant GT

Yes sir, this here competes with the BMW in Wall Street and all around town. It's got the same roof as our big race car. Fast wagons have been an endangered species for some time. And like a commercial that asks you to help save the pandas, which you nod along with, but then you get a snack and you forget about it, many car enthusiasts will profess their love to the wagon, but marry its taller sibling, the crossover. And so fast wagons are rare here. But this might be the rarest. It's the new Audi RS6 Avant GT. Only 85 will come to the U.S. Critics note that it has the same 621-horsepower twin-turbo V8 as the RS6 Performance. And the GT has a familiar, comfortable interior, yet costs $100,000 more. Is it worth it? That's what I'm here to find out. And there are differences between the two cars. Some are invisible. Some are not. So why does this car look like it got stuck in a spider-verse glitch in the Audi paint booth? Well, it's because of this car. More specifically, it's because of the car Audi was campaigning in Trans Am Racing in 1989. It was their first season entering that series, and they basically got banned. They won 8 out of 13 races, and all-wheel drive itself was banned from Trans Am Racing. So what was Audi going to do? Take their dolly and go home? No. They took their dolly to IMSA. And IMSA allowed tubular space frames. So instead of using a sort-of production car, which the Audi 200 was, they got to build this. Tube chassis, but with the brains and brawn from WRC and from that Trans Am car. It had about 720 horsepower, all-wheel drive, weighs nearly nothing, and when it showed up in IMSA, it wrecked the series. It won 7 out of 13 races, took 2nd in the Constructors' Championship, Hans Stuck got 3rd in the Drivers' Championship, and they did all that after skipping two of the biggest races of the year. The differences between the Audi RS6 Performance and the GT are small, but important. Allow me to present them Game Show style. The hood and fenders are now carbon fiber, and there's a new front splitter. 6-spoke Avis wheels, hiding 10-piston carbon ceramic brakes and 3-way adjustable coilovers. The power's the same, but the roof! No roof rack, and there's no sunroof. We have rear wheels, which are good. The rear splitter's the same, but there is a new bit of molding from the tailgate to the bumper that does look really nice. And of course, the big wing. The air goes there. If you get this car in the United States, there's not many options. There's not really any options at all. But if you get it in Europe, it's quite a buffet. You can get it with these carbon bucket seats, which we don't get here. You can also get it in different colors, which is kind of funny, considering the livery is the homage to that race car. But in Europe, you can get a couple other liveries. You can also get it in simple colors. Except the Audi RS6 Performance does 0-60 in 3.3 seconds. And this does it in 3.2. Let's find out. It will also go on to a top speed of 190 miles per hour, which is 35 miles per hour higher than the normal RS6 Avant Performance goes. All right, let's be real. The numbers aren't that impressive because they're not that different. A tenth of a second, who could notice? Especially today when it's 100 degrees out. However, there is one thing you cannot change about this car in the United States that I'm happy about, and that is the suspension. They get rid of the adaptive air ride that comes with the normal RS6 Avant. And instead, you get triple adjustable coilovers. In Europe, you can get a bunch of different suspensions. But I kind of respect the fact that the car is an homage and you get one option here. If you're going to model something after a race car, remove some of the choices. You know, if you want an RS6 Avant on air suspension, just get the RS6 Avant Performance. You get the power, you get the clever center differential, which this one has, and you can get it with height adjustable suspension and save a bunch of money. And you don't have to have the crazy Technicolor shattered glass window pane livery that this has. So I'm glad that here there is something that separates this from the regular RS6, and that is the suspension and the rear differential. The rear differential has been tuned to specifically be a little bit more lively and a little bit more rear biased. You can send up to 85% of available torque to the rear and 70% to the front. I guess if the rear is stuck on the ice, oop, biff that corner. The last RS6 I drove had the air suspension and I was not on a racetrack. I was on a canyon road. So I can't really compare the two apples to apples. But what I will say about this one is that it has the amount of body roll I want from a performance car. It has the firmness feels correct. And the response in turns feels pretty good for a 4,700 pound vehicle. Grip is really impressive. 275 tires all around. Those brakes feel really nice. It is hot today and they are not fading at all. Brake pedal pressure is pretty easy. I can modulate it, but it doesn't require a ton of effort like it does in a McLaren or a Porsche RS or something. And then the speed 80, 90, 100, 110, even on this scorching day, replicating the surface of Mars right now. The speed is ridiculous. Temperature readout is in Celsius. It says 36 degrees. I will do the math in a lower third. Steering response is good. Speed of the rack is perfect. I'm not having to do any hand over hand steering feedback. It's okay. Honestly, comparable to an M3, which is not so much a compliment to the RS6 as it is a insult to the M3. Transmission is an eight-speed automatic, and I am impressed with how it upshifts and downshifts. During some of the laps, I had it in normal drive mode. I was letting it downshift and upshift for itself, and it was choosing the right gear under braking, and it was downshifting to that gear rather quickly. Intuitively, I would say. Same thing that impressed me about PDK when I first experienced it long, long ago was keeping the car in sport drive mode and letting it do the shifting, and it shifted the right way at the right time. It's hard to tell just how different that rear differential is from the normal RS6 performance. They have one here, but they said we can't track it because someone has to get back to the airport. I empathize. Willow Springs on a 100 degree day can be a little bit trying on cars. One cool little note about this car is it's not even built in its entirety next to the other RS6s. It starts there at that factory, but once it's done with paint, it's sent over to where they build the e-tron GT for final assembly, and a special team puts on the new suspension, the new brakes, all that stuff. So between the carbon fiber, the suspension, and the brakes, this car is quite a bit lighter than the other one. Eight kilograms. That's 17 pounds in America, and 17 is a bigger number than eight. That means the total weight is about 4,800 pounds. So yeah, it's not the lightest thing in the world, but that suspension is not so much about weight savings as it is about control and response. You can adjust it three different ways, damping, ride height, and camber, and whoever set this up has done a good job, because this car does a really good job of pretending to be a lighter thing than it is. We've got wide 275 tires all around. The turn-in is pretty quick. It works really well with this steering rack. A little bit of conversation happening between the front and rear tires. I mean, this is an amazing time to be into cars. It really is. This thing probably weighs 1,000 pounds, maybe 2,000 pounds more than that 90 race car down there, but it makes almost the same amount of horsepower. That's just, I understand that that's just how evolution works with automobiles. I'm just saying that while we are sad that there are fewer cheap sports cars out there, God, you just, you have to respect the engineering that is happening at this level. Good Lord. All-wheel drive wagon, adjustable coilovers, big V8 noise. How do you not love this? How do you not love this kind of car? I first loved the B5 S4 wagon. I just thought it was one of the coolest looking things in the world. That was long before I knew about all of their reliability issues and their weight bias and the balance, but this, this doesn't have any of those old Audi problems, and I know that I'm on a really smooth racetrack and I know that the RS6 in the wrong settings can be a little bumpy on the street, but this pays homage to a race car. So they made it feel like a proper sporting car. Yeah, it's heavy, but it is fast. It is fast. Oh Jesus. Oh my God. I can hear your Instagram comments and DMs already. Zach, is it worth the money? On paper, it may not appear that different from other RS6s you can buy, but the price at the bottom of that paper certainly is. This car starts at $225,000, a hundred thousand more than a base RS6 performance. For many, that will be hard to understand, but for true Audi nerds, it won't be. Plenty of other companies tweak an existing product, attach some history, constrain the production numbers, and mark the price up. The 911 ST is the current king of this game, and that car requires a refined palate to feel the difference between it and the GT3 on which it's based. If you have those taste buds, but you also have a family of four and you love Audi, who are we to say that this isn't worth it? And based on how this drives, you will enjoy keeping that fast wagon torch lit. And remember, always fight your tickets on the Off The Record app available in the Android and iOS store, or go to offtherecord.com.