As far as daily driving sports cars go, the Audi RS5 Sportback is among the best. Its fast, fun to drive, surprisingly practical and looks damn good. But a car that’s good at everything is naturally compromised, in terms of being a great sports car. So how does the jack-of-all-trades RS5 Sportback take on a proper sports car like the Porsche 911? Carwow’s Mat Watson finds out in this new video.
These are two very different cars. The Audi RS5 Sportback is a four-door, four-seat performance sedan with a big, practical lift-back tailgate. While the Porsche 911 Carrera 2 S is a proper two-door, two-seat (those back seats can’t fit humans, I don’t care what Porsche says) sports car. The Audi is all-wheel drive while the Porsche, in this case, is rear-wheel drive.
Both cars have fairly similar engines, though. The Audi RS5 Sportback uses a 2.9 liter twin-turbocharged V6 with 450 hp and 443 lb-ft of torque. While the Porsche 911 C2S uses a 3.0 liter twin-turbocharged flat-six with 450 hp and 390 lb-ft. The Porsche is a couple hundred pounds lighter, which helps make up for its torque deficit. Both cars also have eight-speed gearboxes but the Audi’s is a torque-converter auto while the Porsche’s is a dual-clutch unit.
So which car is faster? Well, in the standing quarter-mile, the Porsche 911 is. The Audi RS5 Sportback launches harder off the line, thanks to Quattro all-wheel drive grip, and takes an early lead but the 911 quickly catches up and overtakes. The 911 is also faster in two different rolling races and it even wins a braking test. It’s actually quite shocking to see how handily the new 911 dispatched the Audi RS5 Sportback, as the latter is not a slow car.
Admittedly, the 911 is far more expensive and is a proper sports car. So it should be the faster of the two. But that doesn’t make the ass-whooping that it delivered the Audi RS5 Sportback any less impressive. Kudos to the folks at Porsche, they’ve made a helluva sports car.
