Progress Report: 2007 Audi R8 vs 2019 Audi R8

If you're a massive Top Gear nerd, you might have already spotted this is a special Audi R8.

It's a 2007 R8 4.2 V8 FSI manual. The quintessential original R8. And OY07 MHL is the very car you saw on the television, 12 whole years ago, being power tested by one Jeremy Clarkson, in a terrible cream blazer. Okay, it narrowly lost a drag race to the Porsche 911 Carrera S, but you’ve rarely seen a machine go to the Top Gear test track and leave with higher praise.

Fast-forward to 2019 - 53,000 miles later - and Audi UK has tracked down and bought back this celebrity R8. The workshop’s mildly restored it, undoing the tasteless cosmetic mods wreaked upon it by its previous owner and fitting a fresh set of unkerbed wheels.

Inside, there’s some patina – the plastic has worn on the steering wheel around the volume knob, the leather seats are shinier than Donald Trump’s suits, and the bolsters sag like his jowels.

But there are no squeaks or rattles. The FM radio doesn’t crackle. The air con blows cold, the bum warmers are fiery and beneath a scratched-up alloy gearknob lies the first R8’s defining party piece: the open-gate manual, as precise and purposeful as the day it left the factory for a hard life of impressing journalists. Let’s see if it can pull that off again today, with some awkward company.

Yes, we’ve brought along the new Audi R8. Over a decade since Audi first went after the Porsche 911 and Aston Martin Vantage with a mid-engined, four-wheel drive two-seater, the brief for its flagship is still the same: be a user-friendly, angry-looking everyday supercar. It's just the ingredients – and numbers – have grown up a lot.

A V10 engine with 200bhp more than the original’s RS4-derived V8. An unflappable flappy-paddle gearbox. Driving modes for every mood or weather. And a price, for this R8 V10 Performance, of almost £170,000 as tested with its carbon fibre and Bang & Olufsen garnish.

Even stripped back to base spec, it’s twice the money the old R8 V8 asked when new. Instead of chasing humble Carreras, this one gobbles up 911 Turbos and harries turbo’d McLarens.

Course, you could argue the big numbers, bigger speeds and massive temptation to extend that spectacular V10 and hope you’re not in the eyeline – or earshot – of any local law or dash-cam vigilante isn’t progress. It’s just asking for trouble.

On paper, the new R8’s a much faster, cleverer car for all occasions. But when you just jump in and go, what you notice isn’t the quantity of punch on tap, but how easy the box-fresh car makes everything for you.

Automatic handbrake peels off, gears shift seamlessly without so much as a tap on the horribly cheap plastic paddles, and you know there are multiple sensors and a high-def camera to save any parking bump blushes. Wonder how many of the lessons the VW Group learnt making various Bugattis and Lamborghinis so freakishly useable have drip-dropped down into cars like this.

Mind you, the original R8 was hardly a four-wheeled Justin Bieber, all bratty and disobedient. The visibility is sensational for a mid-engined car. The driving position’s pretty sorted – it’d be nice to sit a bit lower, but you could say the same of the new car.

It starts with a quaint twist of a key, and having let the fine needles sweep around the dial, settles into a whispering idle once the oil’s warm. Watch the temperature gauges settle on the handsome dials – remember when Audis had actual clockfaces, not a giant virtual cockpit screen?

Pop the clutch down. It’s no heavier than a hatchback’s. Pootle away. This car’s hardly an elderly classic, but it feels noticeably smaller on the road than its grandkid, and the more modest wheels and tyres mean it rides more quietly. For all of the new R8’s trick magnetic-adaptive dampers, just fitting sensible rims and doing a good job with the set-up never went out of fashion.

Twenty minutes later, I’m going quicker in the V8, but I’m struggling. Takes me a while to work out what I’m doing wrong, but it dawns on my that I’m driving it like the current R8, hyper-actively.

In the V10, like in most modern supercars, the gearchanges are instant, the steering is superfast, the engine spits out power faster than your brain can quantify it, and you end up with the body language of an MMA fighter, jaggedly stabbing the car down the road, hoovering up corners before chasing down the next one, battering a hole in the horizon and bullying time out of the way.

That’s not the approach for the ‘old’ R8. Take your time. Luxuriate in the mechanical perfection of the narrow-gate gearshift, and let the just-so springing and weight of the solid metal components pull the lever around the gate. Don’t prod the throttle to help send the gear home, just tickle it with your little toenail, or you’ll thwack the V8 into its redline. Relax. Don’t rush it. Everything in moderation.

Because – deep breath, internet flameproof suit on – it’s not really a supercar, the R8 V8. Sure, it’s got the ingredients, of an engine in the middle and a window to view it through, but it’s on the fringes of what makes a supercar silly and special.

Just like the original Honda NSX was, really. This thing’s a rival for base Porsche 911s, or the old V10 BMW M6. It’s a sports car. A very Audi one, complete with its lovely knurled metal switchgear and serious, clinical character.

The new V10 Performance has all that Audi-ness too, but it is very much a supercar. It’ll do 0-60mph in under three seconds, top out at over 200mph, and has exhaust pipes that could double as a garage for the original. In every quantifiable way, it is a better motor car. But the easy going, nothing-to-prove character of the Mk1 is rather loveable, almost quaint.

It's from that brief stitch in time when technology had made sports cars super easy to live with, but hadn’t taken over the whole experience. 

Maybe there’s some allegory there, with the world in 2007 being a slightly simpler time versus now. But to be honest I’m having far too much fun slotting this gearlever about the place to think about it now, thanks.

2007 Audi R8 V8 4.2 FSI

4163cc V8, 414bhp, 317lb ft
6spd manual, AWD
0-62mph in 4.6sec, 187mph
19mpg, 349g/km CO2
1565kg

2019 Audi R8 V10 Performance

5204cc V10, 612bhp, 428lb ft
7spd DSG, AWD
0-62mph in 3.1sec, 205mph
21.2mpg, 298g/km CO2
1670kg