W12 Hillclimb Awesome Sound

[trikezx6r]

Listen to this W12. This may be Essates on here. He was selling brakes on here and mentioned doing a couple of hillclimbs in his...Enjoy

[darrenjoe90]

that sounds almost as good as an s8 i saw today at jct41 on the m1 northbound. left me for dead. was that you darren ?

[trikezx6r]

No mate not me :confused:

[Tipex]

Lol, that thing lumbering around the narrow lanes, confusing it's auto box is quite amusing to watch, a sports car it certainly aint!

[bazza_g]

liking the sound but I can't think of a more strange car to hill climb in?! Got to be horrible on the brakes and tyres?

[W12]

Sounds awsome - good mind to do that to mine - but dont want any annoying drone on motorways and the like...

[trikezx6r]

Sounds awsome - good mind to do that to mine - but dont want any annoying drone on motorways and the like...

On the comments page on youtube it says the exhaust is quiet til you put your foot down

[Chris_B]

Lol, that thing lumbering around the narrow lanes, confusing it's auto box is quite amusing to watch, a sports car it certainly aint!

He should have been shifting on the paddles so he could get it down into the right gear before the corner.

[Essate]

That just goes to show how little you really know......!

[Chris_B]

That just goes to show how little you really know......!

You were shifting manually?

Is that an LWB or an SWB you've got?

Yeah, I know f**k all mate. Ask anyone who's been about here a while, they'll tell you I don't know s**t about Audis actually.

[SINGH]

[Essate]

You were shifting manually?

Is that an LWB or an SWB you've got?

Yeah, I know f**k all mate. Ask anyone who's been about here a while, they'll tell you I don't know s**t about Audis actually.

Sorry this post is a bit long - I hope it might be interesting

Wiscombe hillclimb is a thousand yards of very narrow and sometimes twisty tarmac. The ideal car for speed-hillclimbing ("road-car" - therefor not counting single seaters etc.) would, I suppose be a Caterham Severn.

This particular hill has a "bogey" time of 50 seconds - a quick Caterham will climb it in mid-forty seconds. Some very fast cars do not actually break 50 seconds.

To give you a pointer as to whether or not anyone should hillclimb an A8 - I can get my W12 up that hill in just under 49 seconds. My son uses his 500+ bhp RS6 at the same event and is usually around a second or so quicker! However, he is not quicker anywhere but in the "mid" section which is understandably called "the Esses" (basically because an A8 is a little on the large side to drive up there at speed and those "Esses" are quite a daunting prospect!). There is not much that is faster on the last straight than the W12 (500 bhp and 500 Ft lbs of torque against 2 tonnes of weight are like the proverbial "Smith & Wesson beats FIVE ACES!" analogy - consequently it does move quite quickly!

So if I now say: "Yes, I can better 50 seconds on that hill"......and then I attempt it with the "ESP" (traction control) ON - I would have a problem climbing the hill in under a minute!

Watch the video again and realise "Traction Control" is most definatly OFF, the gear selector is in tiptronic mode and so will only change gear by the paddles on the steering wheel or at maximum RPMs.

Sometimes everything will be fine, sometimes the very intelligent programs in the Audi's ABS and ESP systems will take over and "shut everything down as and when it deems to do so. At the last hairpin, the car is absolutely hurtling towards a very sharp and steep hairpin.......as I was breaking, very hard, with the ABS going absolutely wild, I was also hitting the "Down" paddle continually. The 6HP26a gearbox is quite forgiving and really very good "changer". At this point, I can promise you FIRST gear was well and truly selected, well before the car was actually slowed down enough to turn in to the corner! Then.....bang....even though it is "OFF" the ESP still kicks in and shuts everything down (It obviously thinks: "This bloke is a complete nutter and I really must try and help him!").

The way it seems to work is this: The ESP/traction control functions are performed under the control of the ABS system. You can switch ESP off but there are "Yaw" sensors somewhere above each rear wheel, which compare the steering-angle sensor and even whilst switched off the system will recognise (under some cases) that the car is travelling sideways - and it will shut the engine down! There is nothing that can be done to make it release the engine before it really wants to and the best thing is to just sit tight and hope it accelerates again soon......it shuts the engine down until it is totally happy with everything and then it lets it go once again. At the last hairpin, once I was turned into the top corner, my foot never left the floorboards. Then after 15 or so yards, the ESP released and it took off once again like a scolded cat! (unfortunately just in time to go over the "finish line" and record 49.01 seconds!)

I am trying to find a way to permanently dissable the Yaw sensors and if anyone has any ideas I am open to suggestions.

Finally, the car is a SWB A8 with standard "air" sports suspension. It is lowered by 20mm and has front and rear S8 anti-roll bars fitted. It has 390mm front discs with 6-pot Brembo callipers (V10 RS6) and though I do have several sets of wheels the set I compete on are: 19"x 9" RS6 wheels fitted with 265.35.19 Michelin Pilot Sport "Cups".

It has a little over 500bhp and I think it is one of the best sounding A8s out there (The clips do not do it justice!).

[trikezx6r]

Good on you for hillclimbing it

[Chris_B]

Sorry this post is a bit long - I hope it might be interesting

Thanks for explaining, yes it was interesting.

Sorry for calling your technique into question then, but in my defence it's harder to judge from a video than from a piece of driving road that you know, so it just looked like it had bogged down due to being in too high a gear.

I do know what you mean about the ESP though, it's never really off (even in a C6 or B8 which have the "long press" off). When it's "off" you can also wake it up by hitting the brakes hard and fast enough to indicate an emergency brake.

There is a way to disable the ESP entirely, and I think it possibly disables ESP as well - I've been driven in a C5 RS 6 Avant round Silverstone on a Driving Experience day, and the dash was full of yellow lights. I asked about how they'd disabled the ESP/ABS but I didn't get an answer. I'd like to know how they did that.

I still don't know if that would help though - I've never been bogged down by the electronics anywhere near as badly in any other gear as when changing down to 1st, so there does seem to be extra protection (be it safety protection, or some kind of mechanical protection like the TCU limiting output or something?).

Have you got anything that can log the controller measuring blocks? I've no idea where you'd start looking for something that looks like it's causing that hesitation, but if it's the electronics there will be a controller output somewhere that might give some clues as to what's going on. Yes, I know that's like telling you to go looking for a needle in a haystack!

I don't know if the C6 RS 6 uses the 6HP26A, but it has all the same feel and foibles, so I think it might do, perhaps with a beefier torque converter? The TCU mapping is obviously different, but I suspect the hydraulic pressure has been increased a bit as well, as that thing changes gears stupidly quickly.

500 ponies eh? Nice, and you've beaten Audi to it - the D4 A8L W12 has just been announced with 500 PS from 6.3 litres.

[Essate]

More about ESP and Traction Control

Whenever I use my W12 in anger, I find the ESP and Traction Control very frustrating. Leave it switched "ON" when driving around a racetrack and the car is a really docile, lovely big solid limo and though still very fast, it hardly shows any tyre wear. Switch it "OFF" and the car lights up! It becomes a very impressive and believe it or not, a quite nimble tyre-squealing and drifting monster of a car that bellows out its own sort of orgasmic sound-track. It quite easily makes its tyres look like they've done a very hard 100 mile race in about 10 laps of Brands Hatch. It drifts even better on Michelin "Cups" which are basically a road-legal racing tyre! It will lap at a very similar pace to my son's RS6 which has about 15% more BHP than it left the factory with! The RS6 is quicker......but truly, not by much on a race track! (and certainly not everywhere!)

I have driven a (D3)S8 for a few quick laps of Goodwood and though very similar it has quite a few differences to a W12.

The suspension etc is identical, so is the handing and feel. Whilst I believe the gearbox is identical, the W12 has 50% power-split - front to rear while the S8 can vary it's front and rear split. The final drive ratio in the W12 is (same as an S8) very low - 30mph per 1000 rpm - both accelerate very quickly for big limos and to me, that low final drive is equally as important as the massive power and torque available up front for fast starts!

The W12 and S8 weigh around the same with, I believe the W12 engine weighing a few pounds more than the V10. Power outputs are the same but (and I think this is why the transmissions are spec'd differently) the S8 has 540Nm of torque and the W12 has 40Nm more. I seem to remember reading that the 6HP26A gearbox is capable of handing around 620Nm so I'm guessing but I reckon the W12 at 580Nm is getting a little to close for comfort for Audi design engineers. Even more scary I think my engine has over 600Nm!

I have held my foot on the brakes while building the revs up in both an S8 and my W12 and the torque converter seems as if it might be the same part number (i.e. both "stall" at about 2,500 rpm) - if you then let the S8 brakes off it will squeal the tyres to pull away. Build up the W12 and then let the brakes off and the Traction Control takes over (even if switched OFF) it dies immediately the brake is released and stays dead until it feels like accelerating - same as my exit from the final hairpin at Wiscombe. The way I pull away quickly on a hillclimb start is to just press the peddle "quite" quickly but not "slam it" down from tick-over. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't! I can make my car record a sub-five seconds to 60 (using a data logger) but not guaranteed every time!

As a test, I am going to try removing the ABS fuses to find out once and for all if that will switch the ESP off! I suspect that it will then become a tyre-smoking monster.

Incidentally driving both cars at a track day to compare the S8 feels different and possibly even feels faster because it loves revs and is red-lined at 7000 against the W12's 6300 but the W12 feels more powerful and much more torquey and will pull from lower revs in any gear and IMHO is quicker all round whilst feeling lazier - but don't forget, I am biased.

[Chris_B]

I had one of the first SWB W12s in the UK (picked it up from Ingolstadt to get it a bit quicker!) which replaced a C5 RS 6 saloon (I was desperate for the W12 because the RS 6 was picking up miles and I tried an AMG E55 and didn't like it). I had my W12 for about 20 months, and did some 60,000 miles.

Never tracked it, but Lincolnshire has some pretty "interesting" rural A roads, especially late at night. I like to think of Lincolnshire as the UK's own Nurburg, just not a ring and a lot bigger - 2274 square miles of "green hell"!

I changed that for a D3 S8 when they came out (again, I had one of the first ones here AFAIK) and I had that for a year, so I am pretty familiar with the similarities and differences. Your W12 will be a lot closer to the S8 with the ARBs from an S8, but yes there are other very small suspension tweaks, a small engine weight difference, and the S8 has the rear-biased centre diff which can push up to 85% of torque to the rear. The ESP behaviour seems to be programmed differently too.

It's that last one that's the biggest change IMHO. Combining the rear power bias with ESP that's a little bit more accepting of enthusiastic driving when "OFF" makes a noticeable difference. I was lucky enough to go to a launch event at Silverstone, and we had two cars over from Germany and got three laps of the Southern Circuit each with a professional driver riding shotgun (and usually doing the gears on the Tip lever for people). Suffice to say I insisted I do my own gear changes on the paddles! I only really made one mistake on the 1st lap in a chicane they'd put in - should have cogged it down to 2nd, but was still trying to drive those extra Nm and few less rpms in my W12!

When we left, we gunned the W12 from the flat, and yes you can feel the extra torque - it is faster once it's moving.

Anyway, I had my S8 for a year, then had a year in an allroad 3.0 TDI Tip (that was a big change!). I got another D3 S8 for erm, three months. My RS 6 Avant (C6) turned up three months sooner than expected when I first ordered it. I nearly skipped the RS 6, but a week before it was due, they loaned me a demo car overnight and that was that - I *had* to have one! I'm so easy to get into a new car!

The RS 6 has had 22 months and 34,000 miles and has just gone. The replacement is a B8 S4 Avant with damper control, sport differential and some toys. OK, most of the toys.

After I ordered it, I got invited to go drive the D4 A8 in Berlin, which I did last weekend. Now that is a stunning car! The optional (standard on 4.2 TDI) sport differential makes a massive difference to handling, and understeer is just about gone if you're putting some power down to drive the rear diff (coasting understeer still very much possible though).

I did sign some papers to say I wouldn't say certain things (under pain of a 10,000 EUR penalty!) but I did ask about D4 S8 and it "might" come sooner than the D3 S8 did. It also may well be a 4.2 litre V8, and I did hear the hurriedly-muttered words "roots-type charger". I reckon a 500PS supercharged 4.2 V8, that 8-speed box and sport differential with a tad stiffer ARBs and bushings over the standard A8, and slightly less boosted steering, would be absolutely amazing. Let's hope Audi deliver!