June 01, 2025

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Premium

BULL IN BANGLES

I'm beginning to feel like the engineers at Audi's RS division have been feeling a lit- tle left out of this whole process of making Audi a brand that aligns with tree-huggers and polar bear lovers. While the rest of the Audi lineup gets increasingly friendly, hybridised, and dare I say--mindful--the RS boys have just been hanging around the Nürburgring car park like unsupervised teenagers with access to a CNC machine. Sure, there's the occasional S3 update or a facelifted RS 3 that makes the rounds, but by and large, they've been quiet. Too quietSo, when their presumably cobweb-riddled hotline finally rang to inform them they needed to begin work on a quick update for the RS Q8, they overcompensated with the enthusiasm of a teenager left alone with their dad's credit card. Keep in mind, this is, in essence, a mid-life facelift. But if you've spent even ten minutes in the outgoing version, you'll know this is no ordinary update. This is a statementYou get the sense the RS crew felt like they had something to prove. Maybe it was the rising popularity of the Lamborghini Urus Performante, a car that shares its DNA with the Q8 but wears much louder clothes and charges twice as much at the club. Maybe it was BMW's XM or the Urus SE giving people the illusion that plugin hybrids could also be fire-breathing monsters. Whatever it was, the RS Q8 Performance is the answer. And it's more of a mic drop than a facelift. The RS Q8 was always the underthe-radar bruiser in the Volkswagen Group's heavyweight SUV division. It was quieter than the Urus, cheaper, more mature, but arguably less fun at the limit. This updated version has been downing double espressos and watching old DTM races on repeat. The biggest headline? 641 horsepower and 850Nm of torque? That it's up from 600bhp and 800Nm? Nah, that's not it. Here's the kicker--it now laps the Nürburgring in 7 mins 36 seconds. That's six and a half sec-

HOLE IN ONE

Here's the thing about the Volkswagen Golf GTI Mk 8.5. If you're the kind of person who looks at a hot hatchback and instinctively starts calculating boot space, fuel economy, and how many Excel sheets the infotainment system can support, you might want to flip these pages right now. But if you're someone who hears the word GTI and immediately pictures a red stripe slicing across a blacked-out grille like a katana through tofu, welcome. Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way first. This is not a cheap car. Not here in India anyway. It's going to be a fullblown CBU import, and that means a sticker price of just above Rs 50 lakh, all said and done. Fifty. For a Golf. That's more than a decent luxury sedan, or even a couple of lesser sportscars. It also makes it a bit of a cultural experiment. A global icon, dropped into a market that's still not sure how to categorise its car loversAnd yet, the first batch is already sold out. It's tempting to say this is a pricing disaster, but maybe--just maybe--we're underestimating the Indian enthusiast. Maybe we've moved past looking for a spec sheetto-rupee conversion. Maybe we're finally okay with buying into legacy. Into the idea of a hot hatch as a piece of rolling heritage. Into the GTIAnd this new Mk 8.5 version? It's not just resting on legacy. It's here to remind you exactly why it wears those three letters on its rump.