2025 Audi RS3 First Drive Review: Unadulterated Fun

The phrase “become one with the car” is so overused in car reviews that I’ve always avoided using it on one of my own. While somewhat romantic, it’s a lazy way of summing up several thoughts and emotions into a catchy phrase worthy of a magazine cover or marketing slogan. Yet here I am, using it to describe a highly-regarded car that I, until now, have remained skeptical about. The 2025 Audi RS3 is a fun-loving sedan with chops so impeccable you’ll feel like you’ve… become one with the car.

If you’re rolling your eyes at this hypocrisy and ready to click away from this page, skip to the juicy driving portion of this review before doing so. Perhaps you’ll realize there’s some truth to that cheesy cliche—a truth that might send you straight into an Audi dealership ready to sign some paperwork.

What’s New?

Marking a mid-cycle refresh for its third generation, there’s plenty to love about the refreshed 2025 RS3. There are new bumpers up front and out back—each more aggressively styled—a sportier hexagonal grille, digital OLED taillights, and digital daytime running lights whose digital light signatures can be customized. Newly developed, extra-grippy Pirelli P Zero R 245/35 R19 tires wrap around 19-inch, aluminum cast 10-spoke wheels while massive exhaust pipes out back look borrowed from the defunct R8 supercar.

Not everything is new, however, and that’s a good thing. The 2.5-liter turbo five-cylinder engine and seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission combo that everyone loves remains, and so do the clever torque-splitting rear differential, adaptive dampers, and Quattro all-wheel drive. Another trait that remains is the RS3’s mighty attitude, which now carries on inside with new mood lighting and an RS-specific red theme. A new, super rad steering wheel that’s flat at the top and the bottom serves as the cabin’s focal point—looking a bit like one from a Pikes Peak rally car. It’s great to look at and even better to touch, much like the carbon-backed seats—though sadly Audi confirmed those buckets are for Europe only. Womp womp.

Lastly, Audi hasn’t released final specs for the States-bound 2025 RS3 yet, but the 2024 sold here pumped out 401 horsepower and 369 lb-ft of torque. The Euro-spec car I drove here was rated at 396 hp.

Driving Experience

During the presentation, one of Audi’s engineers brought up a slide displaying the trajectory of the outgoing RS3 through a corner, showing the car at the corner entry, apex, and corner exit. It showed the torque-splitter differential and Quattro’s behavior through each of these steps—highlighting how each system helped the car stay on course and nail the apex. Then, a new layer was added to the slide, showing the new 2025 RS3’s path. The juxtaposition of old and new claimed that the 2025 model could more accurately attack the same corner at a considerably higher speed but without losing its composure. In other words, it can go through corners faster without understeering.

According to the engineer, the difference wasn’t minimal either, and he claimed that we’d be able to feel the new software tweaks on the track the next day. While this sounded promising, these differences didn’t mean much to me given that I had never driven the previous car. 

Skip to the part where I’m flying through a corner at 90 mph and snaking through a chicane at 60-plus. “Oh shit,” I said a few times throughout the first couple of laps of Castellolí. My mind kept on going back to those graphics from the previous night’s presentation. By this point, I had already spent about two hours driving and riding in the RS3 on public roads, but the track unlocked the RS3’s magic. And boy, was it magical.

Audi clearly wanted to highlight the car’s maneuverability because the track’s slowest corner was a banked hairpin taken at about 50 mph, which then opened up to an extremely fast series of sweepers. Through every single one of them, the RS3 felt at ease carrying loads of speed while gently shifting its weight from one side to another, letting its dampers do their job. Through these bends, the car needed minimal steering input to make it dance, and to the slideshow’s point, it was more about guiding the car with the accelerator by modulating the amount of power sent to the axles. The combination of phenomenal steering, sticky Pirellis, and some of the most advanced differentials on any car made today delivered exactly what that slideshow had promised me.

Going into a corner, the RS3 felt light on its feet and tossable, and its reactions were so quick that I spent the first few minutes reconsidering my turn-in point at each corner. Realizing that I could brake later and turn in more aggressively, I simply adjusted how much speed I carried through corners—and it was considerably higher than I’d feel comfortable with in most other cars. Also, my first-ever laps on that track were in the bigger and heavier RSQ8, which provided my brain with a baseline that the RS3 shattered with ease. 

By the end of the second lap, I began nailing apexes just like the smart German said the car could do. “Point and shoot,” I kept thinking. “It’s easy to go fast and feel like a racing driver.” And much like Patches O’Houlihan said in Dodgeball: “If you can see the apex, you can nail it.” Fine, what he actually said was, “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball,” but you get the point. Granted, if you’re doing something completely stupid with your speed or positioning through a corner, chances are, you won’t nail it. But the RS3 is so tactile and lovable that it may just let you get away with it.

A couple of sectors required rotating the car very quickly to align for the next corner after, and this would happen while I was coming in cookin’ from the previous one. Depending on how smoothly I could do this, the RS3 would feel super solid or give me a little shake at the rear to remind me that I need to do better. I experienced the latter a couple of times until I tweaked my entry and fine-tuned my braking point. Turning into the apex and exiting the corner with your foot all the way down gives you an insight into the kind of split-second decisions the car is making in regard to power, torque, and traction—and it’s loads of fun. Getting ambitious with the right foot on corner exit will kick the back end just enough to make you feel like a hero but not so much that you freak out; though that depends on how easily you freak out, I suppose.

Audi’s carbon ceramic brakes do the slowing down thing with ease, never showing any fade throughout my time on the track. There were two especially heavy braking zones at Castellolí: Turn 1 and a temporary chicane Audi installed to keep speeds reasonable on the back straight. The former involved braking from about 120 mph to 70-ish, while the latter was more intense—probably something like 120 to about 60 mph. You could really feel physics at work in those two instances, with the weight of the car becoming more noticeable there than anywhere else on the track. It took a couple of laps to get used to my heavy butt slightly levitating off the seat each time I came through there, and I can confirm the seatbelts work flawlessly.

Away from the track, and on the narrow and twisty roads around Montserrat, the RS3 felt at home carving hairpins, dancing around switchbacks, and blasting its throaty tune through tunnels. The most noticeable characteristic of the RS3 on the street was its adaptive suspension. I never found a mode that I was truly happy with, as Comfort mode made the ride a bit too bouncy at times, and switching to Dynamic or RS made it too stiff.

On the highway, the RS3 felt relaxed and nothing—and I mean nothing—led me to believe that the small-ish sedan was capable of doing such naughty things on the track. The cabin was quiet, steering was firm and quick, but not overly heavy or darty. As I mentioned before, the cars I tested were all Euro spec, so the seats and other bits you see in the photos may not transfer over to the eventual American-spec cars.

The Early Verdict

The RS3 quickly jumped to the top of my list of favorite cars; but more importantly, it also now lives on the list of cars I would actually buy with my own money. My all-time favorite car happens to be a hatchback that shares a lot in common with the RS3 in terms of provenance, characteristics, attitude, and best of all: bang for the buck.

There were very few scenarios in which the 2025 Audi RS3 disappointed me, passing most tests with flying colors. Although, I would like more seat time to really explore its on-street character. Ignore the spec sheet and perhaps even ignore this review, and much like the Honda Civic Type R, this is one of those cars that you have to drive—and drive hard—to understand, and subsequently, fall in love with. Oh geez, I just told you what my favorite car is.

On paper, the RS3 may seem like a lot of money for the ‘roided-up version of a compact Audi, but it’s so much more than that. Trust me.

Email the author at jerry@thedrive.com