So, this scribble is all someone needs to become me, huh?
I had a meltdown last week and refused to do my job of reviewing a "car". Someone else stepped up to do it in my place, and caught a cold for her troubles. Instead of feeling thankful, I'm feeling... angry. Insecure. Guilty. Like I'm not really good for anything, and that anyone could just step up and do what I do if I disappeared the next day.
Throwing my spare racing suit into the insatiable abyss that is the rear storage of my FC RX-7, I got to work catching back up to the convoy of AMT trucks after my detour to the dry cleaners, wondering why I'm still having to work so hard for something I can't have.
********************
This thing here's a 2019 Audi RS 5 Turbo DTM. It's a silhouette racecar, meaning that everything under that carbon sheet that roughly resembles an Audi RS 5 is identical to its competitors from Aston, BMW, and even GT500 racecars from the Japanese Super GT series.
In other words, it's a mercenary without loyalty; a simple change of uniform away from being a friend or foe. Seems like a pretty efficient way to go about reviewing cars, this, because once I've driven and written about the RS 5, I have effectively experienced and reviewed 5 cars. So, instead of calling it the Audi RS 5 Turbo DTM, I'm just going to call this thing the "2019 DTM car".
The 2019 DTM cars produce 603HP from a turbocharged 2L Inline 4 engine mounted up front, going through a 6 speed sequential driving the rear wheels. I was immediately concerned when I saw that specific output figure: 301.5HP per litre is either an insane feat of engineering, or an unchecked madman left alone in his basement for way too long. With numbers like that, I was expecting the power curve to be high and sharp enough to stab through the bonnets that house them, but it turns out that I was right only about being high: Peak power happens only at 9,000rpm of 9,700, but peak torque of 650.3N⋅m (479.7lbf⋅ft) happens so low, it's unlikely to ever see track use: 4,000rpm! Considering that the car comes default with weak anti lag settings that idles it at around 2.3k, you can imagine how quickly this engine will get up and go from practically anywhere in its rev band, with the engine tapering off only nearing its 9,700rpm fuel cut, and I personally find best results with the engine shifting it around 9,2. The continuous shove of the turbocharger means that the 2019 DTM can be short shifted to save fuel while barely losing any pace, which allows it to do 8 laps of the ever–popular Sardegna A WTC 800 event with some simple and slight short shifting. Contrast this to the less powerful, less downforce Gr.3 cars that populate the event, which generally have to egregiously short shift with a Fuel Map setting of 4 to last that same 8 laps to make the event a 1 stop! Heck, within that 15 laps, the 2019 DTM car is liable to lap the entire field!
Of course, a lot of that unethical speed and energy company bankrupting fuel efficiency is due to the fact that the 2019 DTM cars have a Push–To–Pass system—or P2P for short—activated from a red ring of death on the steering wheel. P2P temporarily increases the fuel flow rate to the engine to produce up to 30 more HP on demand, but also more crucially for an endurance event, it also levels out the towering rear wing of the car to reduce drag on the straights when the downforce is not needed. I have to confess, though, that I don't really feel that extra 30HP kicking in at all when the button is pressed; only a reduction in drag and downforce, making the P2P system more akin to a simplistic Drag Reduction System (DRS) instead. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as DRS doesn't expand any more resources on board to give that boost in straight line speed, which means that, absent any sanctioning body stipulating that a chasing car must be within a certain gap to the leading car, or designated DRS zones on a track, the DRS of the 2019 DTM can be used almost anywhere on the circuit and for however much the driver wishes... and it makes the car more fuel efficient! The only hardware limitation in place is that DRS is forcibly disabled when not using at least three quarters of the throttle pedal, and the car needs to be doing at least 140km/h (87mph) before the system can be activated. Of course, the obvious drawback to such a drawback free system is that you're basically forced to use it at all times in a competitive setting, forcing you to relearn how to hold the wheel in a way that lets you keep the DRS button held down for almost the entirety of the race, which is both painful and awkward, almost like learning to live with a fresh, crippling injury.
Even though DRS isn't supposed to be used in corners, more often than not I find myself taking high speed corners that rigorously test for downforce and richly reward speed, such as Blanchimont and Eau Rouge of Spa, with both the throttle pedal and P2P button fully pinned down. This is because the DRS button doesn't simply make vanish the expensive carbon wing of the car, instead only toning it down. According to a mysterious source who wishes only to be known as ddm, DRS on the 2019 DTM reduces drag and downforce from 580 drags and 650 downforces to 550 and 450 respectively. There might be some real units in there, but I'm not smart enough to figure them out. With a mere 70% of its rear downforce, the 2019 DTM feels properly alive in the corners, almost like it was set up specifically for running with that supposedly reduced downforce—it felt so much more able to rotate and turn, instead of being figuratively chained to the stakes of its wing stands. I could take corners faster and needed to slow down less because of one silly little button on the wheel, and the only way that quality of life feature gets any more zoomer is if the damn thing were on a touchscreen instead of a physical button, and played the oh no no song upon activation.
Reading this, you might be tempted to find some sort of hardware hack that can just keep the button glued down the whole race, but don't break out your plasma cutters and glue just yet!
While the 2019 DTM feels much better to drive with DRS enabled, that's only because the car is more unstable in a corner, which crazy types like fighter pilots and racing drivers like to some extent. But, the 2019 DTM, even when driven like a "normal" racing car without DRS, naturally wears its rear tyres out more, especially at circuits with multiple low speed, 1st gear corners, necessitating slight wheelspin for the best corner exits. Not to mention, I like my 2019 DTM best with a full rearward brake bias of +5, as that insane rear wing that usually understeers the car for stability snaps back to its full downforce configuration upon braking, meaning that the rear tyres will have absurd grip that can more than fully utilise that +5 rear brake bias to massively shorten braking distances, while freeing up the front tyres for a sharper turn in. Under the short lived Class 1 regulations, these cars aren't allowed driver aids such as TCS and ABS, and even with a full rear bias, it's still the front inside tyre that skids first on hard braking zones after the downforce washes off the car, while the rears stay stable and quiet. I think the car can handle way, WAY more rearward brake biases of maybe +7 or +8 no problem if the brake controller could go that far back. With Brake Bias and Anti–Lag settings completely disabled and reverted under BoP settings, the car honestly feels crippled not being able to run a rear brake bias; you have to brake so much earlier not only because the car takes longer to slow, but it can't slice into a corner with the same razor sharpness as it otherwise could when unrestricted.
All that is to say that the fat Racing Medium tyres on the rear of the car is subject to a LOT of abuse in a sprint scenario, which might make one hesitate juuuust a teeny bit about smothering the P2P button on their wheel in corners that much as the event wears on, because the thing about high downforce cars is that, once they go, they're gone. As with all high–downforce cars, the car is set to scrape on its own shadow, and has rock hard suspension to withstand it all, both of which means that the 2019 DTM is completely destroyed by kerbs and road imperfections. Running the car without ABS, it genuinely makes me avoid kerbs as though a deathly allergy, which makes tracks that necessitates kerb abuse, most notably Dragon Trail: Seaside, especially torturous to navigate, as in addition to learning to hold the steering wheel differently, you'll also need to fight your instincts to avoid the kerbs. This holds doubly true for inside kerbs with a slight bit of elevation to them, such as Paul Frère of Spa. Holding down the DRS button when plowing through them will send the car off into a costly slide, at the bare minimum. Because of that painful first hand experience, I now comfort lift off the DRS button when clipping apexes of turns, and you might want to do the same if you ever find yourself behind the very many colourful rings of the steering wheel of a 2019 DTM one day.
Being the only car in Gr.2 that has P2P, I had to know how it stacks up against the other cars in the category, and what better comparison to than the 2016 GT-R GT500? FR, 2L turbo Inline 4, and 6 speed gearbox, it even makes the exact same engine noise as the 2019 DTM despite not yet having adopted Class 1 regs fully at the time. As far as I can make out then, the only difference between the two cars is that one has DRS, and the other doesn't. How would Balance of Performance handle this peculiar situation, then?
Seemingly, BoP balances out the P2P system of the RS 5 by assuming it's being used at all times, with no perceptible straight line difference between the DTM and the GT500 machine with DRS active. I had initially thought I'd much prefer driving the GT500 machines because they don't force me to learn how to hold the wheel awkwardly just to be on a level playing field with everyone else, but it took only about 2 corners of Nürburgring GP for me to spin out the GT500 GT-R during free practice, having lost it on the tame outside rumble strips of Turn 2, when the car was almost fully straightened out. The GT500 machines are set so much lower to the ground, it feels like their underbodies are as much tyres as the tyres themselves! Running the 2019 DTM and 2016 GT500 together in the same race, it was immediately evident that the 2016 cars were sparking constantly, whereas the 2019 cars did not, which could explain why the older cars are so much more nervous and easily upset by microscopic road imperfections, making the DTM car feel as plush and forgiving as a soft hotel bed. While the RS 5 also has a nasty torque bump somewhere around 5,000rpm when navigating out of tight, low speed turns, that same bump at the same rpm is much, much more violent in the GT500 car, and you'll never hear it coming with the engine being so quiet that far down the rev range. It got so bad that I had to swallow my pride and ask Ted from Technical to stick a TCS module into my GT500 GT-R, just to survive. At this point, I'm not even sure which of these two closely specced, but rather different cars is the easier to drive.
All things considered, though, the 2019 DTM car is properly mega. It may be the costliest yet we've tested under my watch in COTW, but I'm told by my editor to write that it'd easily turn a profit for under an hour of driving, making it perhaps the cheapest car we've tested in terms of time cost instead of financial cost. I have no idea what that means, don't ask me. The shenanigans with having to learn how to hold the steering wheel oddly is painful and irritating at first, but after a while, I began to really relish the control over the rear downforce it affords me, and in so doing, helps me really appreciate the downforce going over the car, just as driving a manual or without ABS helps me appreciate power and torque curves, how to gently and smoothly engage the clutch, or distribute front tyre loads. It's a bleeding raw racing car that affords its driver extremely pure and undiluted control, and it demands utmost dedication and concentration from its driver in return to tame it. I may have been throwing shade subtly at the car by calling it the "2019 DTM" and even putting a Honda Civic livery on it the whole week, but I think, over the many races I've had with the car, I've really grown to appreciate it a lot more. Rather than being disappointed that it has no real identity without its easily changeable clothes, I've now come to see that it's a brilliant racing car that looks good wearing anything. And isn't that true beauty? One that comes from within?
It reminds me that I need to do and be better, not only so that I can wear other clothes and make them look good, but also so that no one else can simply scrawl a few words over my racing suit to become me.
No comments:
Post a Comment