Testing the rally skills of a $180,000 Audi R8 Spyder: Motoramic TV

Ah, the life of a supercar. Take a look around high-roller enclaves like Miami Beach or Malibu and you’ll surely see plenty of brightly colored mid-engine lust buckets idling their way through traffic en route to the restaurant valet stand. It’s a shame, but the cars most capable of astounding feats of speed are the ones most likely to spend their days in traffic purgatory, 95 percent of their performance left in the envelope. I like to sneak the keys to cars like that and break them out of jail, put them to the glorious use that their engineers intended.

And that’s how I find myself sliding sideways up an unplowed mountain road in an Audi R8 V10 Spyder. We are at the O’Neil Rally School in New Hampshire, home to a 600-acre driving playground, a fleet of rally cars and no valets.

O’Neil uses Audi 4000s for its all-wheel-drive classes, which is why the hills are alive with the singular reverberation of 15 cylinders at work — 10 in the R8 and another five under the hood of the 1984 4000 Quattro that’s chasing me up the hill. That car’s driven by O’Neil director of special projects Wyatt Knox, who’s having no problem keeping up with me despite the fact that I have 525 horsepower and he’s driving an angular little 30-year-old tank. Driving skills aside, snow-covered gravel is a great equalizer. And those old Audis are actually pretty amazing little cars.

“They’re really overbuilt, in terms of axles, diffs, CV joints,” Knox says. “They’re good learner cars because they have factory locking diffs in the center and rear.” Thus, you have to practice good rally techniques to get them to turn. “With these things, you’d better be sliding before you even get to the corner,” he says.

The R8, on the other hand, is happy to camouflage my shortcomings with its abundance of power and tail-wagging 70 percent nominal rear torque bias. Knox demonstrates the correct way to link turns through the slalom, squeezing the brake before turning in so that the front tires bite to help set up the turn. He gracefully dances the R8 down through the cones, going so fast that the wind buffets me through the side window. The windshield doesn’t help much when you’re doing 45 mph sideways.