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The R8. I haven’t known too many cars that induce drooling and heart palpitations, from so many people, as this car. It’s not just the gear-heads and auto-knowledge ninjas either. I know business women that love them, young kids that have chased them, and retirees that give an informed nod when I mention it. I will skip listing the numerous awards, accolades, press and 849568 posts online-that simply say, “I want one”-we all love it. It is an incredibly brilliant piece of automotive engineering.

The only real complaint anyone had about the car was that it was under-powered. The 4.2 liter V-8 is a great engine, but it was holding the R8 back (a point supported by the introduction of the R8 V10). A number of companies (ABT, MTM, PES Tuning) have years of experience supercharging this motor in the RS4, so naturally supercharger kits came about quickly, with online promotional videos quickly following. The videos were epic (Watch Matt in the PES R8). What was a tame, polished scalpel was now a powerful but precise katana sword. The MTM R8 made 560hp, and had a sound track that shook your ribcage and stirred the soul. What was “the perfect super-car” to the masses had now been perfected for the purists.

But for Jason Heffner, there was another way to skin this cat that hadn’t been explored: turbos.

Yes turbos. Those happy little swirls of metal that give slow cars a pair of balls and fast cars a pair of balls made of Pluto and the moon. Jason Heffner, of Heffner Performance, has been building turbo-charged exotics for over a decade. We showed you their TT LP-640, and they’ve been having equal success with the new Lamborghini LP-560, with a few breaking the 1000hp barrier.

Well if you know how to build a daily driven TT Lamborghini-the equivalent of giving a real bull some HGH and cocaine right before you hop on- you can probably help the R8 with it’s horsepower deficiency. Using the stock motor, Jason fabricated a custom exhaust system that accepted a pair of Performance Turbocharging turbos. The quality of the work is surgical, the design elegant. The custom-made after-cooler looks  clean, simple and beautiful; you would think Audi had built it themselves.

So what are the results from the world’s first twin-turbo Audi R8? At 6 psi, on pump gas, it made 536AWHP (Click to view Dyno chart) Heffner’s R8 basically makes the same power at the wheels as the ABT and MTM cars do at the crank. That is not to say the other cars aren’t incredible, they are. With instant power and torque, they let the R8 to keep it’s V8 “feel”. The Heffner turbo system simply takes this docile supercar and turns it into an absolute weapon. Lag appears to be minimal, and the sound is as good as ever. The sound of the blow-off valve surrounded by a thunderous bombardment of V8 is truly awesome. And if that doesn’t fix your addiction for power, you can pour in some 100 octane juice and transform your car into a 600AWHP, sub-11 second missile.

Whether you prefer turbos or superchargers is a matter of personal preference and the goals you have for the car. But no matter which route you take, adding some extra air to you R8 is a very good thing. What made the R8 the “perfect supercar” was it’s ability to handle any task you wished, whether it was lapping Laguna Seca or getting coffee, with a poise and control not often seen in exotic cars. What the Heffner package does is erase the only complaint ever written in the R8′s work file. It also makes it almost pointless to own anything else. This isn’t merely a daily driver supercar, it’s a daily driver hypercar. With this much power, in this car, there’s no reason to own much else.

-Zack K

Watch the on-road testing here.

The dyno run.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 10:27 pm and is filed under News, Video, Viewer Submission. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.