2026 Audi RS3 Competition Limited | PH Review
With probably its final throw, Audi has made the RS3 a money-no-object purchase - can the car live up to it?
Easy not to like the RS3 Competition Limited on paper. As accustomed as we are to the creep of new car asking prices - an incline so steep that it makes your water bill look like good value - no hot hatch, no matter how special or rare it is claimed to be, should cost more than £90k. For all the performance confetti heaped upon it, there is no concealing the modest front-engined family car underneath, nor the fattened profit margin factored in on top. As a number of forum users pointed out last year, the choice between a lightly used 911 and a trumped-up Audi A3 really ought to be no choice at all. One is a sublime cocktail of driver-first decisions; the other is the equivalent of adding Jack Daniels flavouring to a can of Coke.
Meeting the Competition in the flesh doesn’t move the needle much either. Granted, the current RS3 looks very fetching in Malachite Green over 19-inch Neodymium gold wheels - and the combination is going to guarantee you some attention from any passerby in the know - but there’s a whiff of Halfords to some of its stick-on body parts, a sentiment not necessarily helped by an interior that features more than a little beige (or ‘Ginger white’, to hear Audi tell it). Reams of Alcantara are never not welcome in a hot hatch, of course, nor handsome RS bucket seats - though it’s unusual, when gathering first impressions of a high-priced performance car, to consider how much your nan would approve of it.
Beyond the canards and the soft furnishings, there isn’t much visual evidence of the Competition’s premium at play, aside from being reminded that your car is one of 750 examples globally, and some badges dotted around. Understandable perhaps in a run-out model, though, again, you must make your peace with forking out nearly six figures on a hatchback with an inevitably elderly dash layout, one that still rankles after all this time for being less appealing than its predecessor. Thank goodness Audi never followed VW down the haptic slider hell-hole, and retains an appropriate amount of physical switchgear - meaning the RS3 is less of a slave to its infotainment display than the Golf R. Small mercies and all that.
Forgive the Competition Limited all this and you still arrive at a very expensive hot hatch that purports to mark the 50-year anniversary of the ‘legendary five-cylinder engine’, yet doesn’t cajole a single extra horsepower from its existing output. Granted, with 400 already in the paddock (alongside 369lb ft of torque), the RS3 could hardly be called deficient in the hot hatch power stakes - but given we’re talking about a 2.5-litre lump that’s sufficiently tuneable for Abt to have coaxed an extra 60hp from it with electronic intervention alone (more is possible with an upgraded intercooler), it seems a shame that Audi has not applied itself a little more diligently to what’s going on under the bonnet. Removing some sound insulation from the bulkhead seems like too little recompense.
Instead, like a small child transfixed with the idea of buying 17 Curly Wurlys despite being given free rein of the sweet shop, Neckarsulm has devoted itself almost exclusively to overhauling the chassis - reflecting a mindset adopted elsewhere in the Audi Sport lineup. For the first time, the RS3 gets coilovers, though if anything, the revelation that you now have many, many clicks of three-way adjustment (low- and high-speed compression, as well as rebound) to consider actually undersells the degree of thought that’s obviously gone into the hardware. At the front, the twin-tube dampers are stainless steel with remote reservoirs; at the back, they are aluminium, but beefier too and with thicker piston rods to complement stiffer spring rates. There’s also a new, chunkier anti-roll bar back there.
As you might expect, this level of fettling drops the car by 10mm onto the option of stickier tyres (the UK press car is on Bridgestone Potenzas, though you can have Pirelli P Zero Trofeo Rs if you wish). Lower is invariably better when it comes to factory-tuned hatchbacks, though here it proves the least interesting aspect of the wider Competition overhaul. And that’s because, even without venturing beyond Audi’s recommended settings for road use, what has resulted is not just a slightly leaner, meaner RS3 - a variant we hardly needed - but a wholesale, hand-on-heart lovelier one. Less a swansong to its serrated engine in fact, and more an ode to the far-reaching possibilities of dialling in a passive chassis.
The makeover is noticeable from the first moment, though initially for its firmness as much as anything else. Yet even at very slow speeds, where normally you might expect some brittleness from an RS3 forced even closer to the ground, there is none. The Competition’s ability to smooth the edges off even blunt obstacles is richly evident even in town; a facet that seems doubly impressive when you consider how all-of-a-piece solid it feels when changing direction. While this is precisely the sort of deftness you expect from expensive, custom-tuned coilovers - and the standard RS3 is hardly unmannered without them - it’s hard not to marvel at a hot hatch so abundantly able to pacify a drain cover. I started driving over them deliberately just to go all gooey at the wheel control.
From there on, predictably enough, it keeps getting better. At speed, a vastly superior sense of compliance - the implacable certainty that almost nothing you’re going to hit will unsettle the car - doesn’t just encourage you to drive quicker (though you will), you also drive happier and infinitely more immersed. That pitch and roll are better suppressed is to be expected, the Competition turning in and hunkering down on the proverbial dime - but in the end, it is the absence of slack you marvel at, together with the chassis’s capacity for remaining tautly composed even when the challenge to both compression and rebound seems interminable. To say it is good on a B-road rather undersells it. Show the Competition a stretch of road you hate, and it'll make your head spin.
It is so lavishly more enjoyable than a regular RS3 that several pre-existing limitations do bear mentioning. While the suspension keeps you in explicit, winsome contact with the road surface, the steering feel is not similarly enhanced. It is sufficiently accurate for it not to seem like a burden, though it’s a shame that you can’t lean exuberantly into its resistance the same way you can into the grip being summoned up. It’s a similar story with the standard-fit carbon ceramic brakes, which do a manful job of slowing you down, though often with too little subtlety. The seven-speed DSG’s shortcomings are well established and ultimately foil the kind of manual shift interaction the bristly five-pot deserves.
In fairness, this last point is almost by the by, because never in any previous iteration of RS3 will you have been so inclined to keep Audi’s hard-charging lump in its leery sweet spot. Previously, there was a tendency to dip into its full potential only occasionally - partly a symptom of the chassis being a beat shy of where you’d ideally like its responses to put you. Now, with so much clarity about what's occurring beneath you, and the joined-up cohesiveness to exploit it, there’s no excuse not to gorge away beyond 5,000rpm like Augustus Gloop. On the road, this is best done in RS Performance mode, where the (unaltered) RS Torque Splitter toils to keep things neat and tidy, and the five-pot thrums away at you through the unfettered bulkhead. Possibly there is less of a tendency for it to rotate than in the standard RS3, with its rear end more poised than ever. But I’d take that.
Or I would if I could. Which I can’t, and nor can you - unless you were swift enough into Audi’s good books that it deemed you worthy of one of just 11 examples destined for the UK. If that number seems unreasonably small given the total global volume, you aren’t alone in thinking it. But it does at least make further discussion of the asking price entirely redundant, which is handy given even deep affection for the Competition's upsides hardly justify its 30-odd grand premium. Instead, only a rightful place in history is up for grabs, and in this sense at least there can be no doubt: you’re looking at the best RS3 yet. Which, given the likelihood of a hybridised future, makes it the best RS3 Audi will ever make. Not perfect, perhaps - on paper or in real life - but arguably as close as any all-wheel-drive hot hatch has come. An instant, improbable and slightly galling classic.
SPECIFICATION | 2026 Audi RS3 Competition Limited
Engine: 2,490cc, five-cylinder, turbo
Transmission: 7-speed dual-clutch auto, four-wheel drive
Power (hp): 400 @ 5,600-7,000rpm
Torque (lb ft): 369 @ 2,250-5,600rpm
0-62mph: 3.8 seconds
Top speed: 180mph
Weight: 1,565kg
MPG: TBC
CO2: TBC
Price: £92,855
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and within a few weeks of ownership on the news for death by dangerous driving and hanging out the side of a house I’ve been singing the praises of this generation for other 5 years now I just think it’s brilliant.
It’s a car that truely doesn’t have a weakness and is great at everything.
I ve been singing the praises of this generation for other 5 years now I just think it s brilliant.
It s a car that truely doesn t have a weakness and is great at everything.
Then repeat again 3yrs later.
The RS3 is a fantastic car and there are plenty of aftermarket and visual parts to make a standard one stand out and perform very much like this one. Id have had one in a heartbeat but as a family daily, the boot was just a tad too small.
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