The one change that you can’t easily see but can definitely feel is to the suspension. The GT ditches the normal RS6’s air suspension and replaces it with trick passively damped coilovers. They’re manually three-way adjustable, meaning that you need to jack the car up and get busy with the included spanner set to change the damper settings. The anti-roll bars are also stiffer: 30% at the front, 80% at the rear.
Any fears – or hopes, depending on your point of view – that this turns the RS6 into some sort of uncompromising track special don’t materialise. A two-tonne estate car on 21in wheels and passive suspension has no business riding this well. I don’t know what the dampers on our test car were set to (probably the softer end), but they are a bit of magic. They effectively take out the slight bit of indirectness that the air-sprung RS6 has without making it in any way harsh, busy or reactive.
An RS6 is a big, heavy car, which was a little daunting when I was driving a right-hand-drive example on narrow Spanish roads, but because it responds so naturally and feeds back through the steering, I was soon comfortable pushing it quite hard.
I wouldn’t call it throttle-adjustable: it’s still an Audi, but one that deals in neutrality rather than understeer. That’s partly due to the four-wheel drive system, which is nowhere near as rear-biased as that of a BMW M car. The engine also plays a part: booting the throttle out of tight corners is exceedingly unlikely to bring the rear axle into play, even on wet roads, because by the time the V8 has filled its lungs, the corner has usually straightened out.