Audi TT Coupé quattro review
by Ross Finlay (24 December 1999)
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a Clark Gable that I'm in a CARkeys minority about this car. Some of the other characters here despise the TT Coupé, but I would just love one to have around the house as a toy. If they don't like the dynamics of the pre-mod version, at least they ought to agree that it's a lovely little thing, just standing still. But they don't. Nuts to them.
Retro-style bodywork of stunning confidence and pzazz has produced a car with real character, which makes pedestrians walk into lamp-posts as they turn to watch it go by.
Manufacturing arrangements, though, seem utterly weird. The main factory is at Ingolstadt in Germany and the engine plant is hundreds of miles away - in fact, two countries away - at Györ in Hungary. Overnight trains shuttle components back and forth.
The remarkable thing about the solidly-built Coupé is that, although it's retro to an extreme, it hasn't floated off into the realms of kitsch. From some angles, it looks as if the bodywork has been poured in liquid form over the main components, and allowed to set. This effect isn't as pronounced as it was in the Avus quattro concept car, but it gives the TT a very spare, pared-down appearance, which the stand-out wing extensions and the big six-spoke alloys emphasize.
So the interior's uncomfortably cramped, then? Far from it. The CARkeys claustrophobe approached the car nervously, but the cabin is actually wide and spacious, and far less forbidding than the high waist and shallow windows suggest. Mind you, the lot-less-than-occasional rear seats are a complete joke.
Another snag is that a tall driver had better be prepared for some skull-cracking impacts before getting used to the very low exit roofline.
he interior is plastered with alloy fittings - pedals and clutch foot rest, instrument rims, fascia vent surrounds, gearlever surround, gearlever knob and several more. But the design team knew when to call a halt, and the effect is retro-sporting without making the TT . . . umm, OTT. They didn't stop quite quickly enough, though, because in winter that gearlever knob is so cold it's actually painful to the touch.
Out on the road, you have to accept the weight penalty of a four-wheel drive system, but the 180bhp version performs more strongly than some of its critics suggest. One very new car I tried had a much more positive gearchange than Audi's floppy norm. A second one, with a higher mileage on the clock, didn't feel so good.
At brisk but not dramatic speeds, I thought the test car's cornering grip and dry-road traction were fine. So was the response of the fly-by-wire throttle. Maybe I was just bumbling along, but I didn't experience the kind of handling problems which have brought the TT such scary publicity on its home ground, and have forced Audi into its recall programme.But it doesn't relish the kind of bumpy British B-class roads German engineers are reluctant to admit exist, because their definition of road surface includes the word "smooth".
Second opinion: Who allowed the TT to go into production in this state? It feels uncomfortable - in terms of both ride and handling - from as little as 25mph, principally because there is so much roll at the rear and it is so badly damped. Driven with any enthusiasm at all, it feels ready to leap backwards into the scenery, as indeed several already have. Audi's offer to modify existing cars for free is laudable, but the fact that it has to be done is a major embarrassment. David Finlay.
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