► We live with the hotter S3
► Is it fast and engaging?
► We’ll find out over the next few months
Carefully manipulated to fit in the space left between the practical A3 and the all-out, full-fat Audi RS3, the S3 has often been labelled with the automotive equivalent of middle-child syndrome. It’s doomed to be too good to be an underdog like a nicely-spec’d A3, and clipped from birth to be one step behind the top-dog RS3.
That is until now, apparently. CAR has driven both the prototype and proper production versions of Audi’s warm hatch, and my colleagues tell me this is finally an Audi S3 with its own personality. Better yet, it’s an S3 that offers engagement and feedback rather than numb, well-engineered performance.
Certainly my long-term test car gives every impression that it’s trying to carve out a space in the Ingolstadt hierarchy. Audi Sport badges pop up with an almost parodic frequency, and the rest of the car tries to look meaner than the A3 – without encroaching on RS3 territory.
It’s an unenviable tightrope to walk, but I reckon the S3 comes out of it well: multiple badges aside, the new diffuser and other exotic bits of trim look more distinguished than the A3’s, but don’t stray into wannabe RS3 territory. For me, its visual restraint sits in a golden space between plain A3 and the slightly overdone top model, and my hope is that the car lives up to those looks.
Our Black Edition TFSI S-tronic is helped by District Green, an optional colour that seems to be oddly divisive. Yours for £595, it’s an extraordinary military green blessed with rich gold flecks. It’s moody in bad weather but spectacular in the sun.
It can’t do much about the S3’s uninteresting grille, but it does at least accentuate Ingolstadt’s current fondness for precise, creased panels.
On first acquaintance the interior gives less to get excited about. Maybe that’s because I’ve spent time in the A3. Although our S3 gets nappa leather seats and black Alcantara-style material on the dash, it feels very similar to the A3 – a perfectly good interior, but a missed opportunity if Audi wants to distinguish the S from the A.
The S3 has a 10.1-inch touch- screen and digital cockpit display. Our car is the Black Edition, which brings features including adaptive cruise, a head-up display and Audi Presense.
This particular car also gets the £3050 Technology Pro pack: customisable LED matrix headlights, a panoramic sunroof, lane-change assist, and electrically adjustable front seats with a memory function, among other bits. Those all strike me as worthwhile additions. They take our car to a total of £51,135 on the road.
Under the surface, the S3 gets a mixture of hand-me-downs from the outgoing RS3 and a few new bits of its own. The turbocharged inline-four returns, now with more pep thanks to a bump of 23bhp and 15lb ft for a total of 328bhp and 310lb ft. That’s good enough for a 0-62mph sprint of 4.7 seconds and a top speed limited to 155mph. That’s a small but significant amount slower than the 3.8sec sprint the RS3’s 395bhp five-cylinder achieves.
Chassis-wise, the S3 gets new pivot bearings at the bottom of its MacPherson struts that allow more negative camber than before. Grip is increased further over the last car by stiffer wishbone bearings and new tyres. The S3 is also the beneficiary of a new torque splitter, lifted wholesale from the current RS3: it uses two clutches, one per rear driveshaft, and splits torque between the left and right wheels on a granular level. After assessing the conditions and steering angle in fractions of a second, it can give the rear outside wheel more power for a snappier turn-in.
Put it altogether, and on paper at least the new S3 seems to be another well-engineered product. But is it an exciting new chapter for Audi’s often shunned middle child? Has the warm sedan finally found its own groove? So far I’ve barely driven it around the block, but over the next few months I’m going to find out if this is what the S3 should’ve been all along.
Logbook: Audi S3 (month 1)
Price: £47,490 (£51,135 as tested)
Performance: 1984cc turbocharged four-cylinder, 328bhp, 4.7sec 0-62mph, 155mph
Efficiency: 34.4mpg (official), n/a mpg (tested), 188g/km CO2
Energy cost: n/a p per mile
Miles this month: 33
Total miles: 159