2022 Audi R8 Spyder: Last Drive in Audi's Supercar

The Audi R8 is having a long goodbye. We’ve been expecting an announcement of its departure for almost a year. Our last review declared it “most of the way to retirement.” And that was in December 2021.

Not that we want to hurry it along—there’s already a dangerous shortage of naturally-aspirated thunder in our lives, and we have no desire to see the R8 rumble off into the sunset. Of course, if our desires dictated the car market, then you’d all be driving station wagons with 800 horsepower, and they would be brown. It doesn’t take any skill with stars or cards to know that a V-10 in a model that shares both its engine and chassis with the Lamborghini Huracán—which has officially announced its retirement—is unlikely to have a future past 2024.

We could curl up and cry about it, and indeed, some of us have, but it seemed the best way to celebrate the R8’s cannonade of combustion is to spend some time in one.

Now, Car and Driver as a team has been in just about every R8, from the Le Mans prototype, before the road-legal sports car existed, back when the racer was only a three-time winner (it would go on to gather two more) to the early models of the first generation production car. Over more than a decade of R8-ing, there have been some reoccurring thoughts. From the get-go, the R8 struck us as more functional than your run-of-the-mill mid-engine machine. Csaba Csere described a 2008 V-8 model as “roomy,” “racy,” and “useful.” Ten years and a generation later, Eric Tingwall pronounced the 2017 V-10 Plus “graceful and sophisticated … compliant and comfortable."

When I asked our current team for Audi memories, testing director Dave VanderWerp mentioned it was the first car he ever set a sub-three-minute lap time in at our annual Lightning Lap testing, and highlighted the R8's dual nature. His other R8 recollection was of a road trip through Napa with his wife. When asked which of those was the bigger thrill, he wisely didn’t answer.

Road test editor, Becca Hackett, was working in automotive fleet management when the first R8s came to the States and had the unenviable job of keeping her foot off the floor. “The cars would often arrive straight from the port so we would have to unwrap them and put the first 500 break-in miles on them. I spent a couple of weeks driving multiple R8s before the automotive journalists even laid eyes on them.”

Associate news editor Caleb Miller is going to be jealous reading this. As a relative newbie in the C/D office, he has yet to get behind the wheel of an R8, but he’s loved them ever since he saw Iron Man as a kid. “I was obsessed with Iron Man, and by association, the R8 became one of my favorite supercars. It looked so low and sleek, and I think the association with the badass, tech-king Tony Stark made it seem even more futuristic. But it also felt semi-attainable, in that I would see one every so often.”