RED, HOT AND BLUE

摘要

If you feel the need to lug stuff about at speed, is a bit of driver involvement too much to ask? Dan Prosser rounds up four very potent estates to find out. The explosive Audi RS2, all 311bhp of it, is often reckoned to be the world's first high-performance estate. Certainly it was the first car to combine the practicality of a bigger-booted wagon body with the straight-line speed of a supercar. Thanks to its quattro four-wheel-drive system and punchy turbocharged engine, it was actually faster to 30mph than the mighty McLaren F1, as discovered by this magazine's road testers in the mid-1990s - but the first rapid estate car it was not. BMW's E34 M5 Touring had arrived two years before it, in 1992, albeit in left-hand-drive markets only.