199 or 200mph, it's Audi's fastest road car

There are a number of witty and well-known motoring quotes which are attributed to Lotus founder Colin Chapman. One is “To add speed, add lightness”, while another is “Adding power makes you faster on the straights, but subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere.” Both of these apply to Audi’s latest version of the R8 supercar, the GT (above). Bosses have announced the car goes on sale this summer priced £142,585 with first deliveries due next spring. Just 33 examples are available for UK customers. The car is 100kg lighter than before, and the V10 engine’s power has been boosted by an extra 35bhp to give it an eye-watering 560bhp. It will hit 199mph and because of that is Audi’s fastest ever production road car. But why not make it go 200mph? ‘Audi’s first 200mph car’ is surely a better headline than ‘Audi’s fastest road car’. I put the question to the company and the answer is that the targets were all metric – a 100kg weight saving and a 320km/h top speed. “Unfortunately the imperial conversions rarely end up being evocative numbers. However, the experience of driving the R8 GT will be equally thrilling for both imperially-minded and metric-minded customers,” said an Audi spokesman. That’s a quote Colin Chapman would have been proud of, but the irony is that 320km/h is 200mph!