Rain. On certain days it's therapeutic, cathartic. On others it’s frustrating, but today it's downright maddening. The clouds above have gone through fifty shades of grey, dropping every type of torrential from the fine drizzle that penetrates every single layer of clothing to Forrest Gump-style, "big ol’ fat rain". Only snapper Ben is as persistent as the precipitation, but even he’s starting to lose all feeling in his fingers.

You might think these are the days when a Quattro-equipped Audi would shine, but any minute now the convoy is expecting Noah’s Ark to come past on the inside. Tread depth and bravery are the barometers of performance right now, not bhp & lateral G. Still, most other performance cars would have long packed up and gone home, or not even left the driveway in the first place. Who are we to deny a couple of V8s and a pair of turbochargers from singing in the rain?

The origin of the high-performance estate car is up for debate, but arguably no manufacturer has the market cornered like Audi. Volvo made a bid for the crown in the mid-nineties but for all its image-re-defining touring car chic, the T5R never troubled the rear mirrors of an RS2. Not much would – the uber wagon could famously outpace a McLaren F1…to 30mph. The RS badge then migrated onto the tailgate of the A4 Avant, and later expanded by introducing the RS6, but the ability to humble supercars remained - just as the dictionary states ‘see BMW M5 ’ under the super saloon definition, Vorsprung Durch Technik is the byword for plastering the family hound to the back window.

The RS2 spawned in 1994 as the offspring of a joint venture between Audi and Porsche. Audi supplied the donor S2 Avant whilst Porsche quite literally stamped their mark on the brakes, chassis & power delivery - lift the bonnet of an RS2 and it's the iconic Porsche typeface that greets you, not the four rings of Ingolstadt. Porsche's engineers were rightly proud of