The RS 6 is getting the Pirellis off today, to be replaced with Contis. The Pirellis were down to the tread wear blocks and it really shows in the handling and feel when driving in the wet.
I'm lucky in that I live close to a quite extensive rural road network without much traffic about, so by taking a minor-road route across the hills, I can find plenty of empty roads with only grass verges and the odd hawthorn hedge to embarrass myself with if things go badly wrong.
So, as the tyres are coming off today, I thought it wouldn't be a bad thing to use the last remaining life in them up a bit faster and do some exploration of the potential in the RS 6.
In the wet, on poor tyres, you suddenly appreciate what ESP normally does. I'm not a big fan of 'pressing on' with ESP fully active, as I think it's a little bit too keen to intervene too heavily, and it completely destroys any sense of fluidity, so I tend to enjoy the car with ESP in 'sportmode'. I didn't think that sportmode seemed to intervene much, but with ESP off I realised just how much work it is doing in sportmode, albeit very subtly.
I could feel the wheels twitch as they hit puddles of standing water, I could feel the onset of understeer going into corners without power, and I could feel the balance between under and oversteer cornering with a dose of throttle and the revs high to keep the back end a bit looser. You feel very little of that with ESP in sportmode. The car felt a lot more connected to the road (as much as can be in any quattro car, anyway), and I could get a better sense of where it was going to break to as it happened.
It does explain how a spirited drive in sportmode manages to produce such prodigous amounts of heat and ping from the front end when you stop...
I have a deeper level of respect for the RS 6 now - it truly is a feat of engineering to make 2100 kgs behave like that.
It's almost tempting to pick up some cheap scrappy 2nd-hand 18" wheels, a torque wrench and a bottle jack - I have a potential regular supply of ~2-3mm rubber, and a lot of it is in 18" size (think A3, TT, A4 sport wheels!)...
