Conquering SIC in an Audi R8

MANILA, Philippines - Anyone who’s ever driven around the Sepang International Circuit (SIC) in Malaysia will surely agree – that’s one tricky course. The 5.54-kilometer race track full of wide straights and sweeping corners is best known for hosting the Formula One Malaysian Grand Prix. But it takes several laps on your own to make one realize that it’s really quite the testy track. There are some tempting corners in SIC that are meant to make you think twice about either pushing a car to its limits or tempering one’s enthusiasm. In other words, it takes driving around SIC to actually respect the people who get to conquer it.

Personally, I’d fallen for SIC’s mini-traps over and over again throughout the course of my career as a motoring journalist. I’d driven a whole slew of cars around SIC before – including a handful of really good ones from several German manufacturers. Always, I would fall victim to the wide chicane on turns 5 and 6. Always, I would find myself fooled by the tricky turn 9 hairpin. Most of the time, I’d go wide and I would do what comes naturally to a driver with hits wits still about him – I would slow down. A couple of weeks ago, before once again taking on SIC, I was told to trust the car I was driving more and allow technology to help me temper my limitations as a driver. This was the first time I was driving around SIC in a car with the combination of power and road grip as this car did. And so I did. The car that would eventually make me feel like I actually knew SIC was the Audi R8. Without batting an eyelash, I would say that the Audi R8 is the most intuitive car I have ever taken around that particular race track.

First off, what exactly is the Audi R8? The Audi R8 is a mid-engined two-seater originally developed by Audi’s Quattro GmbH high-performance subsidiary. As suggested by the sentence above, like most high performance automobiles made by Audi, it runs on all fours. This, and its aluminum monocoque frame, makes it a very balanced and light sports car. In its V10 configuration, it registers a healthy 525 horses and a mind-boggling 530nm of torque. For the uninformed, it was the car lead character Tony Stark used to drive to his private jet in the original Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey, Jr.

Now, prior to this particular SIC engagement, which was meant to show us exactly what Quattro technology can do in a controlled environment, I had never driven the Audi R8. I am familiar with Audis, of course, the local distributors PGA Cars having leant The Philippine STAR its share of their feisty yet super comfortable sedan test units in the past. But up to a couple of weeks ago, I had never driven a car with four rings around a proper race track. It’s a good thing I lost my “Audi race track virginity” in an R8. And it’s a good thing it happened in SIC.

As I had mentioned earlier, the car has what it takes to propel one around at breakneck speed with relative ease. But, as our Australian lead instructor Steve Pizzati so succinctly put it, driving a sports car fast on the straights isn’t the most important thing, driving it hard but correctly on the tricky corners is. Apart from the aforementioned balance, which is the result of the convergence of several technologies in the Audi R8, I’d say the one thing that helped me finally conquer SIC was the car’s R-Tronic semi-automatic gearbox. The Audi R8’s R-Tronic system does the shifting for the car, depending on one’s inputs, of course. What I did was simply put the lever on “drive”, switch on the “sport” button, and let the car do the thinking as I got busy with the steering and the pedal pushing. The system was so intuitive, so intelligent, that I would later tell the rest of the Filipino contingent that the Audi R8 is the perfect sports car for dummies like me who are stubborn in their ways and take time to learn how to conquer dangerous curves. My driving partner, Manila Bulletin’s Anjo Perez (who is quite an established driver himself but agrees that SIC does tend to trick him still), would agree wholeheartedly. Anjo’s exact words were, “Sa sobrang galing nung kotse, parang ang galing natin! (Because the car was so good, you’d think we were so good!)”

Before our track day with the Audi R8 at SIC had ended, we were the lot of us confident that we had finally conquered the track correctly. As I had stated earlier in this article, it takes driving SIC to actually respect the people who get to conquer it. But I also have to point this out. It takes a car with a great combination of power, balance and technology to make one who’s only just getting to that next level of driving proficiency on a race track to get over that hump. It takes a car like the Audi R8 to conquer one’s inner demons, and consequently, SIC correctly. So I’ve got one word for anyone who asks how I feel about the Audi R8 now that I’ve driven it properly… Awesome.