Revisit The Best Audi RS4 With Its Iconic Top Gear Appearance

The Audi RS4 will soon be dead. That’s not as dramatic as it first sounds, because it’s going to live on in spirit, but it’s just getting a new name – RS5 – and likely a hybrid powertrain. The upcoming car should be a mighty thing indeed, but based on videos that have popped up of it being thrashed around the Nürburgring, we’re not sure about the noise it makes. Or rather, the lack thereof.

There are no such issues with the second iteration of the RS4, the B7, which we recently crowned the best Audi RS car of all time. With a rip-snorting naturally aspirated 4.2-litre V8 chucking out 444bhp, it would hammer out 62mph in 4.8 seconds – still pretty quick nearly 20 years later.

Better still, unlike every RS4 before and since, it was available as a saloon and a convertible in addition to the de rigeur fast Audi wagon. It really was the whole package, and Top Gear clearly thought so too, as it pitched the B7 RS4 against an unusual competitor in a series that also saw such classic pairings as Bugatti Veyron versus plane, Renault Clio versus bike and Mazda MX-5 versus dog.

The Audi’s challengers were two men. Not just any two men, though – Leo Houlding and Tim Emmett, two incredibly talented free climbers. That, in short, is a sport for adrenaline junkies with especially low instincts for self-preservation and involves hauling yourself upwards with no equipment to assist you and only the barest minimum of safety kit.

Starting at the bottom of the Verdon Gorge in France, Jeremy Clarkson would drive the RS4 to the top, using the wiggling mountain roads to prove that, unlike its predecessor, the B7 was more than a one-trick pony and could eat up corners just as well as straights. Houlding and Emmett, meanwhile, took a shorter, albeit more vertical route – 1200 metres, straight upwards. Of course, in case their ascent wasn’t perilous enough, there was also a fiver at stake. Heavy stuff.

Now, we can’t say for sure if all the stuff about the climbers’ risking falling to their death was genuine or not, but either way, it’s not something we’d do – and not just because we don’t have the core strength.

You’ll almost certainly know the outcome of the race, but either way, it’s worth a rewatch. That’s partly as an example of the kind of lateral thinking when it came to races and challenges that made prime TG brilliant, and partly as a reminder of something we’re missing in the modern car landscape: small saloons with big, naturally aspirated V8s. For a brief, glorious period, this RS4, the E90 BMW M3, W204 Mercedes C63 and Lexus IS-F were all on sale at once. We miss them all.