We’ve waited a long time for this. We’ve worked the phone endlessly, juggled schedules, pored over maps of several states, made plans and as they fell apart, we made some more. Getting our hands on an Audi R8 on a delicious piece of tarmac was proving to be harder than we thought. Why the frenzy to drive the R8? Well quite simply, in our books, the R8 is an icon. It is a fantastic supercar that marches to the beat of its own drum. Despite ample performance to keep hairy chested rivals worried, it was the R8’s low key and unfussy attitude that made it beguiling. More so, because the first generation of Audi’s R8 has been driven off into the sunset and we didn’t even get to say goodbye. The news made ACI staffers sad, especially those who had never driven one, and others because they had and knew what a special car it was. Now, it’s time to cheer up!
Imagine taking something as vicious and volatile as Lamborghini’s Gallardo and turning it into something robot-like. On most days, the R8 embodied the classically clichéd Germanic character – precise, orderly and very matter-of-fact. It made you wonder about its pedigree, given that it had none of the inherent fuss associated with supercars. But, when the road and mood were right, the experience at the wheel of the R8 was something that supercars are bought for, the joy of it. Brilliant and precise? Definitely. Then you pushed harder and realised that spine tingling, connected and intuitive were also applicable. After driving one of the last few R8s to go on sale in the world, I promise you, it took a long time for the buzz to die down.
Well, that isn’t surprising as the car in question here is Audi’s limited-edition R8 LMX. And you may have inferred from the religious ornaments tied on the front bumper that somebody has taken this LMX under his wing. That someone, Dibyalok Patnaik, very generously agreed to loan us his Rs 3-crore supercar. The only hitch? We had to come down to his hometown of Bhubaneshwar to drive it. Again, maps were pored over and frenzied calls were made to find the missing piece of the equation. With a nervous prayer on our lips and plenty of uncertainty in our minds, we found ourselves in Bhubaneshwar looking for the missing piece of our two-piece jigsaw. Just when finding a great road seemed to be out of our grasp, like a blessing from above, a little strip of heaven, right between the Sun Temple in Konark and the Jagannath Temple in Puri, opened up ahead of us.
