The hare, the tortoise, and the dinosaur

I decide to take the Picanto first, whilst Dan jumps into the Quattro and Andrew the Turbo S. With routes pre-programmed into Google Maps and timers started, we trundle together through the beautiful village of Tintern in anticipation of the first derestricted sign. Our radios crackle with light chatter, and at the back of our little convoy I’m finding the Kia refreshingly old-school to drive: a small engined, light, nimble supermini is quite the palate cleanser.

And then before I know it, the national limit is upon us. All of our right feet make the same action, and I know I have but one chance to send my final radio message before the others disappear out of range. ‘I am the weakest link,’ I say. ‘Goodbye’.

After a minute or two, Andrew’s bulbous blue behind is nowhere to be seen, but the light traffic is helping me keep pace with Dan’s squat, muscular haunches. We both work our way past slower vehicles, the overtakes falling rather fortuitously for the Picanto. The Audi repeatedly eases out of sight, only for me to catch up again as soon as it gets caught behind the next farmer or delivery van.

What it does mean is that I get plenty of opportunity to admire the Quattro from behind. Parked next to anything modern it looks decidedly dainty, but observed from the rear on the road, it looks abso-bloody-fantastic. Something about the proportions is just so right – an outrageously wide track for the body, over which those squared off arches somehow make the 215-section tyres look like the racing rubber of yesteryear. It must be something to do with the diddy size of wheel they’re fitted to.

Twenty minutes in, the radio crackles. ‘Mayday. Mayday’. Uh oh. ‘Throttle… lost… floor…’ Interference corrupts the message but my brain is already running through the possibilities. Sure enough, I crest the brow of a hill to see the Quattro pulled up ahead, hazards blinking. I feel a rush of guilt, on two counts. The Audi is my sister’s car, which has spent the last three months in and out of the specialist’s, as she battled to get it ready for today’s travails. And I’ve only gone and broken it. Not just that, but this whole test might just be scuppered too. Are we about to spend the rest of the day waiting for recovery trucks?

Dan opens the door and shows me his terminally floppy throttle pedal. Under the bonnet, the cause is immediately apparent – the throttle pulley has come off the spindle, springs and wires akimbo. I reassemble it, but we are short of one crucial component – the nut that holds the assembly in place. We creep to a local garage, where Dan has a brainwave: simply use a zip tie round the spindle. So we do, and it seems to work.

This leg of the test is blown, so all that remains is to get to the Llangynidr Mountain Viewpoint, where Andrew will be waiting for us. Still, we continue the way we began and the plucky little Picanto remains in sight of the Audi all the way to Llangattock, whereupon the traffic lifts. The Quattro disappears up into the clouds, as the gutless Picanto chugs up the hill, the moderate gradient determining an extremely strained terminal velocity of 52mph. In perhaps the only lesson from this first leg, in those last four twisty mountain miles the Audi opened up 40 seconds over the Kia.

We huddle in photographer Max’s car to debrief. ‘It’s devastating, and I don’t think I ever used all 700 horsepower,’ says Andrew. ‘It says to you, “sit back and watch this”, and you’re treated to an amazing show. Just like going to the theatre.’ Is it any fun though? ‘Well, of course you’re enjoying it. But it’s not like being on stage yourself.’

I ask for Dan’s take on the Quattro, breakdown aside. ‘It’s exactly the kind of car that I enjoy driving. It’s light, and compact. The body’s allowed to breathe, and it’s so much more expressive and alive than modern cars. I just way prefer those sensations.’ Did it still feel fast? ‘As long as you keep it on the boil, yes. It’s still quick.’

Time for the second leg, and I take Dan’s place in the Audi whilst he upgrades to the Porsche. Andrew’s turn for the short straw. I’m already familiar with the Quattro having driven it across to Wales. Despite the funky seating position, steering wheel skewed off to the left and absence of space in the footwell (I suspect the original LHD versions are better in this regard) it feels like slipping into a pair of old shoes. Maybe cars from the era we grew up driving always feel like this?

But immediately I have to adjust to the additional effort required over the Kia – clutch, throttle, steering and especially brakes all carry significantly more heft. It’s not a difficult car to drive, almost the opposite in fact by the performance car standards of the period, but after the Picanto it feels like a brute.

The first few miles are tight and twisty, with overtaking opportunities at a premium. The Audi hangs on gamely to the Porsche ahead, whilst the Kia drops out of radio range behind. On these narrow and twisty roads, the monstrous Turbo S is held in check, and following is significantly easier than leading.

Nevertheless, the Quattro is being challenged by the complexity of the surface we’re encountering. It’s close to the limit of its available body control, braking power and grip, and I’m starting to perspire a little behind the wheel – despite the heavy rain we’re having to cleave through. My right hand is as busy adjusting the wipers as the left hand is on the gearstick.

‘I spent the thick end of a week in a 20V upon its launch in 1989. And it was an experience I will never, ever forget. The car was that good, that quick, that special,’ to quote Ti contributor Steve Sutcliffe. And his words would seem to be borne out by the fact that mile upon mile, Stuttgart’s latest and greatest can’t shake the dinosaur on its tail.

Three quarters of an hour in, the radio crackles. ‘We’ve been here before,’ says Dan. He’s right. We’ve just spent 15 minutes driving in a big circle. The cause? A waypoint failing to clear on both our apps, which then sent us on an enormous loop to drive us straight past it again. So that’s this leg of the test blown too. What a disaster.

Waypoints cleared, we set off again – the Porsche eventually beating the Audi to the Black Mountain Quarries by just over a minute, all of it found in the final four miles’ mountainous ascent.

‘You’re totally neutered by the real world in that thing,’ says Dan as we debrief. ‘Whether it’s narrow roads, speed limits, traffic or weather. Everything just conspires to frustrate the car and thus you. At one point the road opened up and I thought, yippee, here we go. And then it started chucking it down so hard I couldn’t see anything. There’s always something. And then the Quattro appears in your mirrors again.’

Unlike the Kia, the Audi had enough power to overtake slower moving traffic, and enough chassis pedigree to keep the Porsche honest on the narrow, twisty roads of this leg. ‘If these mountain sections were tens of miles at a time the Porsche would smoke everything,’ says Dan, ‘but they’re only four or five miles at a time, so ultimately the advantage is measured in seconds.’

Our personal battle is all very well, but Andrew gets straight to the point on the wretched status of the test so far. ‘How are we going to unf**k ourselves out of this?’ It’s an excellent question. Everything depends on the one roll of the dice, 43 miles and 1 hour 10 minutes (according to Google) we have left.

It’s my turn to strap into the Turbo S, and I have to confess to feeling a touch overwhelmed. I have no idea how any of it works, and there’s no time to familiarise. I can’t connect to CarPlay for the essential maps, I have no clue how to disable the ADAS, and I can’t even put the car into reverse, or select manual for the paddles. I radio for help before we’ve even left the car park. ‘Would you like to go back in the Picanto?’ asks Dan.

A not unreasonable suggestion. The Porsche has got an entire 996-generation Carrera’s worth of power on top of my already souped-up 450bhp Lotus Evora (Litchfield having recently dynoed a bone stock example at 750bhp). There’s a wet, gravelly, narrow descent down a mountain ahead. Two road testers of the calibre and experience of the Ti founders behind me. On previous evidence there would be no shame in not disappearing out of sight, but what if I actively hold them up? I fear my P45 might be in the post.

Finally, after all these years, I know what Chris Waddle must have felt like stepping up to the penalty spot on that hot July night in Turin. This is it, the integrity of this test now resting entirely on my shoulders. Don’t bungle it.

The first few miles take us down the mountain and through narrow, high-hedged, twisty B-roads. First impressions of the Porsche are that it’s surprisingly biddable. I treat the throttle pedal with due respect, and just look to make smooth progress. The shapes of both Audi and Kia remain resolutely in my mirrors.

Finally the roads open up, from B-road to A-road, and a couple of overtakes put air between the Porsche and the others. I have several miles to carve through delicious countryside and start to revel in the precision and response the Turbo S offers up. It’s so much sharper than the Audi in response to every input that it almost feels like playing a computer game. You just press the buttons and it immediately does the thing – the usual mechanical debate about whether and how to carry out your instructions having been deleted altogether.

I come to a halt at roadworks and start counting. 15 seconds later, the squat muscular shape of the Quattro appears in the mirror. ‘For a car designed in the 1970s,’ radios Andrew, ‘I can’t believe how modern it feels.’ We wait for 30 seconds, and the light turns green. Yet still no sign of the Picanto. On the other side of the roadworks an overtake presents itself. And as the road opens up, that is to be the mirrors’ last sight of the Audi.

The next half an hour is to prove an almost transcendental motoring experience, as each and every one of the stars above align. The roads are sensational, the car merciless, and the traffic just heavy enough to slow the Porsche barely at all, the Audi moderately, and the Kia catastrophically.

Because the Turbo S’s trump card in the real world is overtaking. As Andrew puts it, your TED – time exposed to danger – is minimal. At one point I arrived behind a line of closely packed cars following a slow moving lorry. Your choices: accept defeat and crawl behind them at 35mph, or overtake the lot. The latter being too much to ask for either of the other cars, but before you can say ‘maximum warp, Mr Data. Engage’, in the Turbo S the whole manoeuvre has already been done.

Superbikes are the past masters at making otherwise challenging overtakes safely achievable, but the experience is akin to being strapped to the nose of the Saturn V rocket in your underpants. A sensory explosion of noise, vibrations and physical effort as you desperately hang on against the wind blast.

But in the Turbo S you’re sitting serenely on the bridge of the Enterprise-D as the front of the car enters a different space-time dimension to the rear. Only the distorted curvature of the light outside the window tells you that Einstein’s equations are now all in the bin.

And then you get to the corners on another mountain ascent, and realise the engineers in Stuttgart have entered a set of cheat codes to this video game. PTV, PDCC, PCCB and PAA might as well be akin to entering IDKFA (full ammo) and IDDQD (God mode) on the final level of Doom, because suddenly what seemed impossible is now easy. That Cyberdemon? Pah. The sophistication of the chassis, the damping, the hydraulic anti-roll system and just about every acronym known to man bends the road beneath to the car’s will.

I reach our final destination and exhale, the previous 49 minutes and 30 seconds having passed in an overwhelming sensory blur. I stagger out of the car and stumble round the car park in a daze.

‘It’s a marvel that rewrites the history books,’ writes Ti’s very own Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mel Nichols. ‘No other car on sale could match its tremendously fast point-to-point times.’ Forty four-year-old words that could apply as much to the latest Turbo S as the next car that arrives, some six minutes later.

Andrew pulls into the lay-by grinning like a Cheshire cat. The Audi has that distinct whiff of brakes that only a car driven with true enthusiasm can muster. ‘These were proper weapons in 1989. And it’s amazing how much of that ability it’s retained. It has enough of everything, and not too much of anything. The steering is lovely, although the brakes are shit. I really liked it.’ The Quattro seems to be one dinosaur that refuses to go extinct.

And the Kia Picanto? Dan finally steers it home 30 seconds past the hour. ‘For the first 13 minutes this thing was hilarious, the road was twisty and I was keeping up quite happily. The most fun I’d had all day.’ I can tell there’s a but coming. ‘But the moment you get onto busier roads, you’re just stuck behind traffic you can’t pass. And that’s when it becomes no fun. You’re just frustrated with the lack of performance.’

Finally then, we have our answer – for every 60 minutes in the Picanto, the Quattro needed 55 and the Turbo S 49. But only when every single one of the stars aligned on roads carefully selected for this purpose, as they did for this final leg. Even on this ideal route, nine times out of 10 your progress would be determined as much by the vagaries of traffic, roadworks and sheer chance as much as the vehicle you drive – and the difference would be measured in seconds, if that.

So the rather more pertinent question is which car we’d all choose to drive given one final leg. ‘I know what I’d take,’ says Dan. ‘The Audi.’ Andrew nods in agreement. ‘I enjoyed it much more than I thought I was going to.’ As for me? It would have to be the Porsche, for the sheer sense-mangling intensity of the experience.

But what if the stars didn’t align again, serving up the perfect recipe of roads and traffic? What then…?

Maybe Dan’s fantasy suggestion – a 120bhp Kia Picanto – would fit the bill. In a world where everyone ends up going the same speed, you might as well have a right laugh whilst doing it.

Photography by Max Edleston