Cars with Jan Coomans. Audi Quattro Winter Experience: Familiar but new

Which is something I was quite happy about, because if you’re going to be drifting around on ice an SUV is decidedly less than optimal. The higher center of gravity only makes more difficult to get the front tires to nicely bite into the frozen lake when you enter a turn, increasing the tendency of the car to push wide and refuse to slide on the rear axle. Although, to be fair, for those prone to spinning out and going off into the deep snow which lined the ice tracks, the SUVs were the only cars that could actually get out on their own thanks to having enough ground clearance to not get beached. Which was a real risk in the A5 Sportback, and some time was occasionally lost waiting for a 4WD truck to come to the rescue.

The cars had plenty of power for the level of grip that was available, the Pirelli scorpion zero tires did extremely well in fact in places where there was some snow on the ice. Once that got cleared off by the sliding cars and the bare shiny ice became exposed however grip levels dropped off dramatically. We really would have needed proper non-road legal studs to make the car work in those conditions, but I understand that regular road tires were a sensible choice given the format of this driving course which caters to all driver skill levels. When we got the customary “Quattro Express” passenger ride with Mr. Vasin in a car fitted with proper rally studs though, all I could think about was how much I’d want to drive on tires like that. They can turn a regular Audi A5 into feeling like a rally car.

The driving course runs through various exercises designed to let you get a feeling for the correct slip angles and the kind of work you need to do with the steering wheel to achieve them. The Vasin Driving school instructors are pretty demanding and determined to teach you to drive better. They can sometimes appreciate a nice drift, but they’ll be pointing out that a pretty slide is usually costing you time. Efficiency is the name of the game, and if you’re very very sideways that means you’re probably not going very fast. There’s slalom tracks, oval tracks, and tracks of shapes for which no name has yet been invented. After spending an entire day out on the ice, you’ll feel pretty well spent and ready for a good night’s sleep.

Compared to the A5 Sportback, the Q7 was a distinctly different ball game. There was noticeably more inertia, as you would expect from a larger heavier car, but it was still fairly intuitive to drive. The extra weight and higher center of gravity simply meant that once you started sliding on a clear bit of ice, the sensation was that of trying to tame a giant hockey puck. Or maybe it was a bitt more like curling, as any small change of trajectory took a lot of human effort once the car had gone fully sideways. That’s not to say that the Q7 isn’t an amazing car to drive in winter and on snow — it’s just not as well suited to this particular automotive ballet on ice as the A5 Sportback.

The all electric e-tron meanwhile was yet another very different car to adapt driving on ice. It was actually rather pleasant to lose the sound of a combustion engine as the constant sound of high engine RPMs gets a bit tiring eventually. The lack of sound did make it harder to judge just how much power you were sending to the 4 spinning wheels, so you had to focus more on how hard your right foot was pressing the accelerator pedal. In terms of agility the e-tron felt somewhere in between the A5 and Q7, which is massively impressive given how heavy the e-tron actually is. But due to this not being a traditional car but an electric one which can do all kinds of tricks with the power delivery and torque vectoring, it took a bit of recalibration of my human brain to make it work. It’s certainly less intuitive to drift around tight corners, but its capabilities were very impressive.

As usual, we were given a single lap to prove our skill for a timed shootout on a track we hadn’t tried before. With very limited practice time and only one shot at glory, the trick to doing well is simply to not try too hard. Which is surprisingly difficult when you’re born with male genitalia and a passion for speed. It’s easy to imagine oneself a Finnish rally driver, flying through corners followed by a cloud of snow. Spectacular and skillful. Obviously, I fell well short of that particular target. I was pretty happy with my lap but was forced to lift and brake a little while sideways through the final turn as I wasn’t entirely confident that the trajectory I was on wasn’t going to lead to wiping out the finish flag and timing gear if I kept my foot in it. I’ll never know if I would have made it without this sensible and careful correction, but I do know that I ended up in second place overall 0.6 seconds off the pace. Which, in racing terms, is being the first of the losers. I shall try again next year, if possible.

Ass my first visit to Siberia, it was certainly a memorable one. Compared to my previous Quattro Winter experiences which have all taken part in Karelia, the condition of the ice in Tyumen was a lot better. The weather in this part of the world seems more stable generally, which is probably why they’ve moved it here after the ice refused to gain sufficient thickness in Karelia last year. That being said, the scenery of Karelia is in a totally different league as you’re surrounded only by nature whereas in Tyumen you’ve got a bunch of fossil fuel plants on the horizon which are spewing out fire and smoke around the clock. Still, it’s a pretty gorgeous place to do some ice driving. And they’ve got some interesting food too, which included a couple of first for me such as beaver stew (containing actual beaver, apparently) and a frozen fish which was served… frozen. In small pieces. Well, sinking your teeth into a whole frozen fish would’ve been too unpleasant even for Siberians I suppose.

As for Audi and the Quattro Winter experience, I firmly believe it’s the best manufacturer-organized event of its kind. Which is of course fitting for a brand with a history as rich as it is when it comes to rally and building all-wheel-drive cars. With Evgeny Vasin they’ve got one of the coolest 60-something retired rally driver and he brings with him some of the best instructors in the business. It’s all great fun, but they absolutely insist on making the experience as educational as it can be. I may never have liked school much when I was a kid, but now I can’t wait to go and learn some more of this next winter.