The BMW is immediately lovely, if I’m honest. Slightly lumpy
ride from the big alloys (especially if you play with the various suspension
and map modes other than Comfort, namely the versions marked Sport and Sport+)
but it’s otherwise taut and level, honest and familiar. The engine is big-hearted
and surprisingly willing to rev to 5,000rpm, the 8spd always butlerish with the
appropriate ratio. It has got enough of them, after all. The steering is
slightly heavier and less immediate than the rear-drive version, a touch
gloopier, but the real surprise comes when you find that you can simply flatten
the throttle midway around a wet roundabout and fire out the other side without
fuss. The xDrive system is slightly rear-biased 40/60, so there’s a lot of
familiar BMW-ness about the middle part of a corner, but as soon as you get on
the throttle, xDrive can shuttle 99 per cent of the diesel’s power and torque
to either axle and tap ABS to keep things pointing in the right direction. As
long as you have throttle actually depressed, the xDrive 330d feels pretty much
foolproof. Given how most of us drive in the real world – not power-sliding at
every available opportunity – a couple of grand seems like an old-fashioned
bargain.
No surprises in
the 330d – but not a bad place to spend time. No indication of the car’s AWD
capability, either; xDrive is subtle
RS Q3’s paddles
are apologetic. The rest of the interior is tame: RS badges, carbon bits and a
flat-bottomed wheel. Bah
The A45 is unsurprisingly a more aggressive proposition. At
first, it feels similar in ride to the BMW, but lighter, keener to change
direction and noticeably quicker to accelerate, with at least 20mph of the
cumulative speed down to the gruff exhaust note and chuckling pop-bang overrun.
Not exactly sonorous, just the noisy murder of air and fuel – but lively and
exciting nonetheless. It corners flat and clean with a slight tendency to
understeer when you push it, and it only starts to feel four-wheel drive when
the front begins to wash wide – unsurprising when you find out that the AWD
system is heavily front-biased in most driving, only shifting a maximum of 50
per cent of the engine’s grunt rearwards when the front wheels have detected
slip. In fact, on the road it feels more like a well-sorted front-driver than
AWD, but there’s not much wrong with that. There is one major gripe, though:
the seven-speed ’box can be annoyingly reticent to change down, even when you
have the space in the rev range to do so – which makes for some interesting
gurning coming into long, loaded-up Welsh mountainside corners.
AMG A45: super
seats, quality and design. Those lipstick-red inserts are a bit flash, but the
paddles feel good – even if they don’t deliver
The RS Q3, on the other hand, is more than a bit odd. The
ride is bobbly and frenetic. Not crashy but overly stiff, probably to
counteract the high centre of gravity. There’s little communication through the
steering, and the front-biased Quattro feels like it just makes the car want to
understeer. Lob it at a dry corner, and it’s remarkably flat and stable, but
there’s so little enthusiasm in the way it goes quickly that after a four-hour
stint I’m struggling to see the point of it. Really struggling. The best part
is undoubtedly the engine, which thrums away contentedly, pushing out slightly
more torque than outright power (310lb ft vs. 305bhp). There’s no lack of
punch, but a nagging caveat that bounces along like an infuriating hymn the
entire time you drive the RS Q3: it does very well going fast for a small SUV.
At which point, you start to question why you’d want this kind of vehicle,
because it’s a compromise of the worst kind: not satisfyingly sporty or at all
comfortable, and the strong engine just tends to highlight the deficiencies.
The Merc punts
half The available power backwards in... Mud
Still, maybe the RS Q3 will show up better if we throw some
really slippery stuff at it. In fact, even in the streaming wet, all three of
these cars are approaching illegality before you can really appreciate the
subtleties of their state-of-the-art powertrains. In the absence of snow, we
handily end up at the mouth of the Sweet Lamb Rally Complex. Funny that. Now,
committed rallyists will know the Sweet Lamb name from a plethora of rallies.
It nestles along and inside a fold of gorgeous Welsh valley near Llangurig in
Powys. It’s not an off-road type of place, but a testing facility for rally
cars, so we’re not talking about three feet of mud and axle-twisters, but
slippery road sections and tracks. Somewhere to highlight the benefits of
four-wheel drive without posing any danger to undercarriages. Saying that,
several of the faster sections of Sweet Lamb feature views over unfenced and
otherwise unbounded 150ft drops. Which pose quite a danger to pretty much
everything.
