2023 Audi RS 4 Avant Competition Plus | Fine Wine
Audi Sport has a consistent habit of reworking RS models during their lifespan and they often make you wonder why the car didn’t start off like that to begin with. The 2023 Audi RS 4 Competition Plus is no different.
This is the second product from Audi Sport I’ve ever had the pleasure of driving for a few days. The first model, the R8 LMX, was a car owned by a friend and we did a few road trips with it through the Alps. What stood out back then was the emphasis on the engineering aspect of the car, being littered with trinket-like details that turn adults (who love tech) into little, enthusiastic kids. The Competition Plus package works with a similar strategy: the more you look at everything, the more you see.
BMW M3 Touring Comparison Out The Window
Logically you tend to search for comparable vehicles when reviewing a car, with the Audi RS 4 Competition Plus the first cars that come to mind are its German relatives. Yet those cars, referring to the BMW M3 and the Mercedes-AMG C 63, have both seen new generations come to life recently, where the fourth generation RS 4 has been around since 2017. That age gap invalidates the comparison between these. So why should you care about a car this “old” you ask? Sometimes cars age like wine during their life cycle and this Competition Plus package has just that effect.
The biggest criticism this generation of Audi RS 4 endured during its ongoing lifecycle is that it lacked the engagement that buyers of performance models are after. But it is as if Audi Sport took the criticism to heart and set out with one goal in mind: to turn the critics into believers.
Package Or Edition?
Label it what you like, but we car enthusiasts will look at the Audi RS 4 with the Pack RS Competition Plus as a different model than the stock RS 4. There’s not just a price tag and some marketing, but real technical upgrades that make up the Competition Plus version. It’s a real Audi Sport infused technical party in fact. Testimony to that is that the power output has remained unchanged, at 450 horsepower and 600 Nm, yet acceleration to a hundred has changed.
The list focuses mainly on 6 items, being: adjustable damping, reworked transmission software, an adjusted rear differential, new steering hardware, new exhaust system, and last on the list is a reduction of unsprung weight. The latter is achieved with carbon ceramics up front and on the 'sprung' mass there's an 8-kilogram weight reduction achieved by cutting out some noise insulation.
Feel the urge to dive deeper into the technical aspects? Then satisfy your inner nerd by visiting the official press release of the Audi RS 4 Competition Plus package here.
Fine Wine
I referred to aging wine earlier but it stands true for the work Audi Sport put into this car. Every tweak listed above has a noticeable effect, some quantifiable in numbers and others in emotional impact.
The numerical part boils down to a two-centimeter lowered ride height, the car being 0.2 seconds quicker to a hundred (3.9 seconds), with a higher Vmax of 290 km/h. There are also kilograms less of unsprung weight to carry around, but it's not mentioned anywhere how much this saves you. Last on the list is the least fun: a price tag of € 12,600.01 for the package back in 2023 (BE) and an additional € 6,100.00 for the upgraded brakes. Those mentioned last do cut off two meters when braking from 100 km/h to a standstill.
Emotionally the package transforms the car into something new. It’s the sum of the package that hits just right. Ticking all the boxes petrol heads love, there’s more noise, there's a more connected feel to chassis and steering (that has a new ratio of 1:13.1), and more character even. Understeer killing the character of this Avant seems miles and miles away in this near 1800 kilogram car. This is due to the changed parameters in the differential's control unit, allowing for more torque to go to the rear in "dynamic” driving mode.
Adding up
And all those mechanical tweaks have a surprising side effect too, you start bragging about them to your friends in a way people with expensive watches tend to elaborate similarly about details. Maybe all the nifty details hide the car's age very well, although that only shows in the car's interior. In every other aspect, the RS 4 Competition Plus is a banger. And that it might be late getting into shape, just might make it even more attractive in an underdog-kind of way.
