YOU LOOKING AT ME?

The Audi RS6 is the performance estate godfather, but now the BMW M3 has muscled in on its turf. Matt Saunders prepares for an epic shootout

- Matt Saunders

This feels like a turning of the tables, a rebalancing of the cosmic order, or turning Goliath into David for a few hours - just for the fun of it.

Back in December 2021, not long after the first four-wheel-drive BMW M3 appeared, we convened a twin test between it and the shockingly expensive Audi RS3 Saloon.

You often learn more about a new car by taking it out of its segment pigeonhole and applying a bit of wider-focus perspective than you do by finding the closest rival possible. People don't shop for the performance cars of their waking dreams with painstaking reference to vehicle segments and mechanical type, after all. We just tend to like what we like especially if it's something new.

On that day, the BMW was certainly the bookies' favourite - and in brushing aside the transverse-engined Audi with an ease that surprised even me, it performed like it. Today, however, will be rather different. The gamekeeper has turned interloper.

That's because in front of the BMW M3 xDrive Competition Touring stands arguably the toughest opponent that any fast, four-wheel drive estate car could face in 2023: the ultimate performance wagon in its new-and-improved, even-more-ultimate form. Welcome then, in its Nardo Grey fighting trunks with carbon-fibre trim, the new Audi RS6 Avant Performance all 621bhp and £112,285 of it. We know Munich's new load-lugging M3 is good, but can it really be so good as to beat what has become the most revered fast estate car of them all and arguably the most iconic Audi RS model? This should be interesting. Audi Sport and BMW M do things very differently when it comes to the tuning and execution of their performance cars, but it does feel like the former is tiptoeing into the territory of the latter with the RS6 Performance in particular.