8:59 am, June 9, 2011
It’s the last thing you want to see on a car launch, but sadly they all too often appear. What am I talking about? Plod of course.
News that a car launch has rocked up in town travels around the local area quicker than a bout of E Coli. Policemen are told to position themselves on the exit of every hairpin bend with a gun pointing at you.
But I’ve always thought that if journos get caught by the police, desperate to ring the last bit of power out of their 1.0-litre supermini on test, it’s all their own fault. After all, the police are only doing their job.
That certainly was the view I had until this week.
You see I was very fortunate enough to be on the Audi RS3 launch – a stonkingly good car, available to drive on the roads the original quattro was honed on. All the cars were right-hand-drive and four hours of sheer fun on some of the Austria Alps’ toughest passes awaited.
It was all going so well. My partner and I had explored the handling characteristics in some truly dreadful weather, and the only bit left to do was get back to the hotel. We swapped over in a quaint – if wet – Austrian village, and my partner proceeded out of the village, at a very leisurely pace.
More below video
Around a corner, though, plod was waiting and he beckoned us to pull into a lay-by. We weren’t even doing 30kph, but we did as we were told.
Perplexed glances were exchanged between my partner and I as the policeman began walking over to us. But, he came to my window and started speaking German. Now aware he was talking to an Englishman with a quiff and who was not sat with a steering wheel in front of him, he walked around to my partner’s side and asked him to get out of the car.
‘This is not a licence. This is S**T’
He asked for my partner’s driving licence, which he duly handed over. It was one of those old paper jobs, and was in four different pieces. It looked like discarded chip wrappers, but it WAS a licence.
‘But it is my licence,’ replied my partner rather weakly.
This argument carried on for a further five minutes, with other RS3s passing by at crawling speeds. He especially didn’t understand that the car was Audi’s, and that we were road-testing it.
And then came the question: ‘Var is ze first aid kit?’
‘Ummm…. We can tell you how much torque this car has,’ we replied. Mr. Austrian policeman was not amused.
We searched high and low for 15 minutes, without luck. With the policeman using even more expletives and tapping his notebook with alarming intensity, I resorted to searching EVERYWHERE to find the God-damn first aid kit. I eventually found it in the centre-arm rest.
By now the Austrian’s poor English was used up and he relented and let us go, but only on the proviso: ‘You get a new licence. This one is S**T.’
Back at the hotel, news was rife of our ‘pulling’. Some even said they had seen us being carted away in a black mariah. Our story sounded rubbish in comparison…
Read the full low-down on the Audi RS 3 in the next issue – Issue 40 – of Car Dealer Magazine, out June 20.
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