johnny11 wrote:Hi Chris,
dunno if u remember me but i bought a wheel off you for my c5 rs6 llast year on motorway sevicr station.
as you have had both versions of the RS6 how do they compare. for power and handling?
I do indeed remember - black saloon wasn't it? How's it going?
Well, having had a W12 and two S8s since my last RS 6, I've had a total of four 450hp quattros, but the W12 or S8 couldn't quite match that visceral grunt of the RS 6, even if they weren't slow cars by any means - the W12 in particular had a way of making very quick progress from 100 mph to 170mph, while feeling extremely relaxed. The new RS 6 has that unmistakable RS 6 feeling about it, the feeling that this is a car that just wants to go and keep going.
The C6 RS 6 is quite a different beast to the C5. It shares that same gut-wrenching urge for the horizon, and you can also feel the immense weight of the car when you start to swing it about, but I'd say the handling is improved noticably.
Turn in is sharp (helped by the direct and weighty steering), and front-end understeer is constrained quite well, although ESP is still liable to hinder more than help if you're deliberately pushing the limits. Thankfully, the new RS 6 has tri-mode ESP - on, sportmode and 'off'. Sportmode is a nice compromise, giving a lot more leeway when pushing hard, but still retaining a degree of control over the remaining tendency for that heavy nose to push out on hard cornering. 'Off' is fairly well off, and to be honest, even with 9000 miles experience, I'm still wary of going into 'off' mode, as it can be a bit of a handful.
The rear-biased torque split also helps balance the car a bit more through bends, and it's even briefly possible to get the tail end out, though it will never powerslide like a RWD car, obviously - quattro does too good a job of grabbing the tarmac and pulling the car in a straight line again.
The sport suspension plus with three damper settings is great. I find Comfort is fine in town, but at higher speed it feels al ittle bit too keen to rebound and bounce, so I tend to drop into Dynamic once on the open road. Sport is a little too under-damped for such a heavy car on the average British road, but if you have some new tarmac without any undulations, it does a good job of keeping the car flat and the rubber in touch with the tarmac.
Of course it comes with all the MMI gadget goodness of the C6, which is a bonus.
It is a blindingly fast tourer, and loves fast, flowing roads full of sweeping bends. Overtaking becomes simplicity itself, and the shortest of gaps become luxuriously empty spaces with plenty of time to get out, get past and get back in again.
In tighter twisty stuff, it does an impressive job for it's size, if you don't mind a bit of tyre abuse. I like to think of it this way: if you stretched an R8 out to have room for five adults and a weekend's worth of luggage, I expect you'd stuggle to make the handling any better than the RS 6, especially once you'd added the weight of the necessary 5 litre turbo powerplant to keep it's speed up.
The brakes are a huge improvement over the C5 - I haven't managed to get smoke coming out of these ones yet, not are they corming a nice pattern of minute cracks, as my C5 did at about this sort of mileage...
If you want an everyday driver that's fast, safe, luxurious, relaxed and practical, I don't think the RS 6 can currently be beat for the money.
I should know better, but it's like being a kid in a sweet shop 
