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But when the garage door opens up on this particular cul-de-sac, it reveals something you wouldn’t ordinary find in North America, let alone North Vancouver. It’s a four-wheeled chunk of obtainable unobtainium, a German ex-pat of mixed parentage that’s made its way across the Atlantic and taken up residence in an environment that’s perfect for the hot wagon. It’s an Audi RS2. The RS2.
This RS2 is interesting both specifically and generally. Firstly, if you don’t know much about this four-ringed forbidden fruit, consider the following. Should you peer closely at the badge on the rear, you’d find that it bears the mark of both the expected Audi, and the unexpected Porsche. Pop the hood and it’s the same thing: there’s that rally-bred turbocharged inline-five you’d expect to find in an early hot Audi, but the intake manifold says “Powered by Porsche.”
Moreover, this is the first of a breed – the very first RS car Audi ever built. We’ve had two full decades of this stuff, and when I say “we”, I mean Europe. Canada got the twin-turbo RS6 sedan for one year, the gloriously naturally aspirated RS4 for two years, and the current RS5 and RS7 have only just arrived. In contrast, they’ve been selling M3s and M5s and Mercedes-Benz AMGs here in all sorts of trims, with relatively good availability.
Despite asserting rally-racing dominance after the introduction of quattro all-wheel drive, Audi didn’t really have anything at the top of the food chain to compete with the big BMWs and Mercedes, so they turned to Porsche, who was just winding down their own project. That was the Mercedes 500E, a V8 bruiser of a cruiser that most of the F1 drivers of the day would buy for high-speed autobahn stuff
The Stuttgart-based Rossle-Bau line on which the 500E, and the eventual RS2, would be made first produced Porsche’s ultimate supercar, the 959. Now eclipsed, perhaps, by the capability of the modern 911 Turbo, the 959 showed the way forward into the future. Ditto this humble little wagon.
It belongs to one Rob Stevenson, who surely knew he had a keeper, and in more ways than one. He actually bought the car prior to it passing the fifteen-year grey-market import eligibility, and then flew out to the UK and picked it up – on his honeymoon. The happy couple then drove the car all over Europe, including a trip taking his father-in-law back to his small hometown in Germany.
The RS2 was only really a German home market car, although a few trickled out unofficially here and there (but not here). The base for the car was the Audi 80 wagon, which was not a particularly exciting starting point.
Porsche took Audi’s twenty-valve 2.2L I5 and beefed it up to handle more boost, with a specially ground camshaft and a Bosch ECU. The long engine barely fits under the hood, what with the larger intercooler and associated plumbing for the turbocharger, so there’s an offset radiator and fan.
While they were at it, Porsche also bolted on massive brakes, and Stevenson’s machine has even more impressive stoppers, fitted as it is with the optional 911 Turbo fronts. External clues to just how fast this Audi was include 911 turn signals, wing mirrors, cup-style wheels, and a long reflector on the back hatch to mirror the design of the 964 Carrera. There’re also other, hidden tweaks, such as an extra-thin aluminum plate to cover the spare tire because the wheel was wider than usual.
The cost for all these go-fast goodies was simply astronomical. Stevenson has an original price sheet and, converting from Deutschmarks and adjusting for inflation, his RS2 would have cost about $120,000. When he first saw one as a kid on a trip to Europe, lighting its afterburners out of a parking lot, he knew he had to have one. Thanks to Canadian import laws, some persistence, and a spouse who clearly gets her husband’s affinity for hot Audis, Stevenson now has his dream car.
The RS2 has a 0–50 km/h holeshot that’ll famously take out a McLaren F1 or a contemporary Formula One car.
At the beginning, however, it wasn’t quite the dream he imagined. Having sat for some time, there were leaks to be fixed, and when he got it back home to Canada via ship to Montreal and rail across the prairies, there was all sorts of other fiddling to be done. Happily, Stevenson is an engineer, working with a fuel-cell company in Burnaby partnered with Ford and Mercedes, and thus has both the skill and patience required to keep a very rare car with very rare and expensive parts on the road. Things are made slightly easier by the fact that the extreme rarity of the RS2 makes it eligible for BC collector plates, keeping at least the cost of insurance down.
But never mind the practical nonsense – this thing’s a rocket! You can almost feel that original ultra-capable spirit of the 959 working away underneath the sheet metal, even if the two are only related by the womb in which they were birthed. The RS2 has a 0–50 km/h holeshot that’ll famously take out a McLaren F1 or a contemporary Formula One car, but the roll-on acceleration is very strong once the revs climb past 4,000 rpm.
It’s no slavering monster when that happens, just a deft and grippy machine that’d put you in mind of a previous-generation Golf R with a third more horsepower. It feels just like a grown-up STI, solid and planted, and surely capable of its stated 270 km/h top speed. And you could do that speed with a case full of Henkell Trocken in the back, plus a Rottweiler. Arguably, though Subaru had a hatchback version of their WRX before this, the RS2 kicked off the trend for hot Euro wagons, and the RS line it founded has had a high-velocity cargo hauler in the lineup ever since.
Punting it up the curves of Mount Seymour, the RS2 slows around some hard-pedalling cyclists and then boosts on up through the next corner. The steering is quite light, as you’d expect from an Audi, and the brakes, when you need them, are simply phenomenal.
A front set of heavily bolstered Recaros keep driver and passenger in place, and it’s really only the rest of the interior that gives you a clue as to the two-decade-old nature of the car. The drive is just like any modern car, albeit with more ferocity, with a relatively docile nature until you wake up the turbocharger, and so much grip that it doesn’t matter how hard you prod the beast.
While Stevenson’s car lives a fairly pampered life, the RS2 was built to be driven year-round, in any conditions, at autobahn speeds or along a British B-road at full chat. It can carry a ridiculous amount of cargo, plow through snowdrifts, or spend a happy afternoon at the track, chortling as contemporary rear-drive 964s spin out when the boost kicks in. It’s a Swiss army knife of a car, except just that little bit more stabby.
Obviously, the cost is why we didn’t get a car like this in the first place, but the RS2 is now relatively affordable. There are something like a half-dozen in the Western Provinces, with perhaps similar numbers back East. Given the pedigree of the assembly line, the heritage of the breed, and the ravenous appetite of the collector car market, this is one hot wagon that’s only going to get hotter.
But not this particular RS2, however. It’s just where it should be, tucked away next to knobbly tired mountain bikes on a leaf-lined street. It may have been born in Stuttgart, and built with polished concrete overpasses in mind, but a retirement spent carving up the backroads of BC is just what its Porsche DNA demands
