Where's that rearward torque bias now i need it

This should be some car. Look what is stacked up in its favour. It arrives straight after the R8 V10, arguably the best combination of thrill, flow, usability and desirability yet seen in a supercar. It has a torque-split in its four-wheel- drive system based on the same responses to demands that makes the new S4 the most entertaining front-engined Audi in ages; the S4 will even perform powerslides. And it has a melodious straight-five engine, just like the original Audi Quattro had.

Well, not just like. For a start, the new Audi TT RS’s engine is mounted transversely, not longitudinally and overhanging the nose. In fact it has nothing other than the cylinder count, and elements of the exhaust note, in common with the old Audi fives. Rather its engine block is based on one designed by Audi for the US-market Volkswagen Jetta, re-cast for the TT – literally – in a stronger vermicular-graphite iron, while the direct-injection head is very similar to those that cap an R8 V10, and hence Lamborghini Gallardo, engine.

It’s a compact unit, as it must be to fit across a nose, with slightly undersquare bore-stroke dimensions. It makes 335bhp from its 2480cc, not surprisingly with the help of a turbocharger (another original-Quattro commonality), available all the way from 5400 to 6700rpm. The 332lb ft torque plateau ends just 100rpm earlier, at 5300rpm, having started at 1600rpm. Like an R8 V10’s, this engine shows every sign of delivering energy with the unstoppable thrust of a steam engine even if it can’t quite match an R8’s ultimate crankshaft speeds.

What else? It’s six-speed-manual-only (a good thing, in my view) because there’s no DSG gearbox yet available that will both take the torque and fit the architecture. It betters 9.5L/100km on that fantasyland consumption test, the official combined cycle. An electronic tinker will see the speed limiter intervene at 280kph instead of 250kph; you have to pay for this simple bit of reprogramming, but you do get a carbonfibre dress-up kit for the engine bay. Cynical? Just a bit.

What doesn’t change is the claimed 4.6sec 0-100kph time. This is one fast TT, and so it feels. With the Sport button depressed it’s a loud one, too, with a deep, guttural note released via a now-open valve by the left-hand tailpipe. That valve opens anyway at high speed and load, so Sport doesn’t make the RS go any faster, and after a while the bassy boom gets wearing. However, the button also sharpens the throttle response (it’s pretty crisp to begin with) and firms the optional magnetic dampers.

Our test car lacks these, but it does have 19in wheels instead of the standard 18s. It also has the fixed and worryingly chavtastic rear spoiler that is standard wear unless you insist upon the regular TT’s retractable item. But maybe the fixed one adds useful rear downforce and should therefore be the keen driver’s choice. Not so, says quattro Gmbh’s development manager, Stephan Reil: ‘Our goal was that it should give as a minimum the same downforce as the normal spoiler. It actually gives a tiny bit more, but you can’t feel it.’

Hmm. Maybe the ultimate TT isn’t quite as pure a machine as I’d hoped. Anyway, we’re heading from Cologne to the Zolder circuit in Belgium, and there’s no doubt about the engine’s energy. A high compression ratio for a turbo engine (10:1) makes response as sharp as you’d like, even in the centiseconds before the turbo boosts, and the RS lunges past other traffic with little need for downshifts and big revs. And it does sound good in that harmonic five-pot way, although it gets a touch vibratory at high revs.

Steering? Quick, precise, weighty but numb, so it feels a bigger TT as well as a heavier one. Brakes? Strong but over servoed. Ride? Firm, maybe too firm, but not actually agitated. Handling? Hard to tell on the roads to Zolder, but now the track is ours.

A snag. You’re supposed to be able to disarm everything ESP-related, having passed through a free-ish Sport setting, but for this track exercise all-off is, unfortunately, off-limits. Mad, given that this is the mode that revealed the S4’s talents, but Audi is adamant.

Anyway, the first few bends reveal the steering to be very darty, suggesting a poor correlation of effort and result. As my touch becomes lighter, I discover a car that can’t really take power before the apex because it will just load the front wheels and gently understeer. Where’s that rearward torque-bias now when I need it? There’s lots of grip, and a tidy, minimalist driving style will create rapid laps, but of entertaining interaction with the rear wheels’ tractive effort there is precious little. The TT RS just feels like a fast front-wheel-drive car set up to be inert. It won’t even lift-off oversteer.

What it does do is haul through Zolder’s chicanes in third gear, revs down to 3000, more convincingly than in high-revving second; this is a broadband engine with a very high bit-rate. But in the end the TT RS leaves me wanting more…what? Involvement? Dialogue? Visceral fun? It should be better than this.