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| I think this farm was in Wisconsin... but it just as well could have been in Iowa or Nebraska. (Photo: Jonathan Yarkony, Canadian Auto Press) |
he ListHow to begin? When you like a car and its engine this much, it is hard to slip into the voice of an objective reviewer, so I won't. However, in order to achieve a certain balance, I will throw in some obvious complaints right off the line. To paraphrase an item of hearsay from the locker room (in reference to similar performance cars, no less), this thing drinks gasoline like you wouldn't believe--the original quote had much better impact, but I'm afraid it is not fit for these pages. The S4, during a previous week in my possession, went through over 200 dollars of premium unleaded, and I have yet to finish calculating my total expenses on the return portion of this trip, but I have already gone through U.S. $150 worth of premium on this road trip. Granted, I am never one to drive conservatively, and I was in the car 12 hours in a row two days straight, and then in my free time tackling mountain passes, slipping through the gears like a ninja in a forest at night--okay, maybe I sounded more like Chris Farley in White Ninja -- but I sure felt like a ninja. Although if we're talking martial arts, I would compare the car to David Carradine's traveling-monk Shaolin Kung Fu: even though you think he's moving in slow motion, everyone else is suddenly on the floor or wrapped around lamp-posts.
The
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| A gratuitous cool shot with plenty of obligatory lens flare. (Photo: Justin Couture, Canadian Auto Press) |
S4 builds up power so evenly and smoothly that you don't realize it until you glance down at the speedo' and say to yourself: "holy smokes, how come all the other cars are way back there." Of course, with my full concentration on the clutch and shifter with my eyes splitting duty between the road, the buses standing still and the other cars crawling along ("why is everyone else moving so slowly?") and the tachometer, the speedo' is something of an afterthought. What matters is a) not hitting anything, b) making that perfect shift from first to second with a bit of gratuitous high-revving in the split second before loosing the clutch and freeing all 340-horsepower and 302 lb-ft of torque via 4 wheels to cold dry asphalt, and c) trying to do this without stalling or ripping the clutch to pieces. Mission accomplished.
But it's not so much the output, or at least the specs, that define
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| My perfect living room would have one of these next to the television. (Photo: Justin Couture, Canadian Auto Press) |
this powerplant, rather the intoxicating sound and feel of 8 cylinders competing for attention, begging to be fed at every pause and inviting you into an imbroglio of driving sensations that cannot be had with smaller, turbocharged engines. While turbos and superchargers have their own merits, the gulping burble and blurp when you first twist the key of the S4 is something they can't compete with. At idle, and then very low in the rev range, when the power is just coming to life, the sound is still a deep, feel-it-in-the chest vibration, and higher up in the 4s and 5s on the tach, the engine starts to scream like a horde of Valkyries charging into battle at full pitch -- I just couldn't get enough. I've been thinking about how much it would cost just to get the 4.2 set up next to my TV and stereo so I could sit for an evening, smoking my pipe and relishing a snifter of Cognac, listening to
Don Giovanni mildly in the background as a counterpoint (okay, it's more likely to be Jameson and the Pixies'
Bossanova, but you get the idea). I honestly sat in my car on cold winter mornings turning the car on, then off, on again, and then maybe one more time, off, and on, just to hear that low rumble come to life, with the promise of such power and ease.
