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BY MARK VAUGHN p WHEN AUDI CAME OUT WITH its 525-hp V10-powered all-wheel-drive R8, it seemed like a pretty well-engineered supercar. It didn’t seem to need anything else. But Audi tuning specialists Stasis Engineering gave it an- other 185 hp anyway. Ach du lieber! Stasis Engineering, formerly located in the pad- dock of Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif., and now at Summit Point Raceway in West Virginia, has been tuning Audis for 10 years. Company founder Paul Lambert has been racing for almost a decade more. We have driven two Stasis cre- ations—an A3 and an S5—and liked them both (“Stay in Balance with Stasis,” AW, March 26, 2007; “Stasis State of Tune,” AW, Nov. 3, 2008). The Stasis specialty is suspensions, so being at a race- track is handy. Both the A3 and the S5 went through our slalom faster and held higher g loads around our skidpad than their stock equivalents. So these aren’t just boy-racer modifications. This stuff works. In the past, though, Stasis has shied away from significant engine modifications. “There are millions of dollars in R&D spent on the engine,” Lambert said of our A3 from four years ago. “We can’t hope to put an engineering dent into all the work that’s in there.” The engineers at Stasis have put something more than a dent into this new creation. It’s more like a wallop. The sledge hammer they used was a Magnuson/Eaton twin-scroll supercharger, which pumps in as much as 7.5 psi of boost. The unit sits atop the engine under a big metal plate that ob- scures it from view. All you can see is the Stasis-ma- chined intake plenum leading into it. Installation was a bit of a pain, since the R8 V10 they were working with was something of a proto- type loaned to them by Audi. The relationship with the big German carmaker has its advantages, among which was being able to show off this car on the Audi stand at SEMA last year, Audi’s first of- ficial presence at the storied Las Vegas celebration of style. But the drawback is that a critical cross- member was welded in place above the engine in- stead of bolted. So engineering director Henry Hsu had to work around the big bar while doing the in- stallation. If this stuff was easy, everybody would be doing it. Regardless, the result is a happy, howling 720 hp and 523 lb-ft of tumultuous torque, available across a very wide swath of tachometer. The stain- less-steel Stasis exhaust not only lowers backpres- sure but also tunes the roar that comes out the back end. To make full use of this extra power, the car was lowered three-quarters of an inch with unique springs, shocks and sway bars. It rides on Stasis’s own 20-inch 6061 forged-aluminum-alloy wheels wrapped with Michelin Pilot Sport PS2 rubber, 255/30 in front and 325/25 in the rear. Stasis claims that the setup is good for just more than a g. Unlike the case with the other two Stasis cars we’ve driven, we did not get to take this one to a test track. But during a spirited drive on some twist- ing canyon roads, the steering response and grip felt compelling—about like a Ferrari 458 Italia and maybe a notch better than the car’s Lamborghini Gallardo sibling. Steering was like sitting on the front axle with a tie rod in each hand. On wide-open roads with the throttle floored, it was like taking off in a very small, very angry, nicely styled jet plane, one with a tuned exhaust. Stasis claims 0 to 60 mph in 3.1 seconds, and with the stock automatic transmission, it’s likely that most drivers could achieve something close to that. Hsu estimates the quarter-mile at “under 11 seconds.” We’ll go with that. Only a few things need to be sorted out. This is the exact same car that was on the Audi stand at SEMA, so it was set up as a show car. The tires rubbed the fenders at full lock, but that will go away once they set the car up for the street instead of the show stand, Hsu said. The S5 we drove a few years ago had similar tire rub, which Stasis fixed, so it’s not a big problem. The car comes out in the second quarter of this year with a price, fully kitted out as our test car was, of about $50,000 more than the cost of your R8 V10. The R8 V10 starts at about $150,000, but nobody buys the stripper R8 V10. So by the time you account for installation of this cool kit at one of more than 50 authorized Stasis Audi dealerships in the United States and Canada, you could be ap- proaching a quarter-mil for your new mill. It’s worth it. THE FIXERS THERE AREN’T MANY PROBLEMS THAT 710 HP AND AWD CAN’T CURE 2011 STASIS ENGINEERING CHALLENGE EXTREME AUDI R8 V10 ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM FEBRUARY 7, 2011 AUTOWEEK—LIVING THE AUTOMOTIVE LIFE
