Free guide · quattro GmbH · 2011–2012 · 2.5 TFSI five-cylinder · 340 PS
Audi RS 3 Sportback 8P: what to check before you buy
What this car is, and the six questions that decide whether the one you are looking at is a good buy.
In this guide · 6 chapters
Who built it, and what they built
On 22 November 2010 Audi UK announced a car with one sentence that did most of the work: "The revered RS badge is about to adorn a compact class Audi for the first time." The car was the RS 3 Sportback. Audi's high-performance division, quattro GmbH, took the five-door A3 Sportback as its starting point and, in Audi's words, "in deference to the classic quattros of the Eighties" gave it a turbocharged five-cylinder.
It was built at Audi Hungaria in Győr, on a line next to the TT Coupé, the TT Roadster and the A3 Cabriolet, and the first cars went out to dealers in the spring of 2011. CAR, driving it that year, called it "the smallest, cheapest RS model ever produced by Quattro GmbH" and "a final hurrah for the A3 with a new model just around the corner." That is a fair description of what it is: a new engine and a serious drivetrain in a body that, as Autocar put it later, had "a chassis dating back to 2003."
The engine
The 2.5 TFSI, the same engine Audi had put in the TT RS two years earlier. Audi's figures: 2,480 cc, 340 PS between 5,400 and 6,500 rpm, and 450 Nm from 1,600 all the way to 5,300 rpm. Bore and stroke are 82.5 × 92.8 mm. A single large turbocharger gives "up to 1.2 bar of boost pressure", followed by an intercooler that Audi says is more than 80 per cent efficient. Fuel goes directly into the cylinders, the compression ratio is 10.0:1, and both camshafts are adjustable: according to Audi's training material, the intake camshaft by 42 degrees of crankshaft rotation and the exhaust camshaft by 22.
The block is iron — Audi's own phrase is "strong but light vermicular graphite" — under an aluminium cylinder head, and Audi puts the whole engine at 183 kg. Hold on to two of those details: the iron block, and injection that is direct only. They are two of the things that separate this engine from the one that replaced it.
And then there is the sound, which Audi explains itself: an odd number of cylinders and the firing order 1-2-4-5-3, which alternates between cylinders next to each other and cylinders further apart, at an interval of 144 degrees of crankshaft rotation. Audi UK's launch text called it "a rich, bass-heavy five-cylinder tone."
Which engine code? CEPA. Audi's training material for the TT RS gives that code for the 340 PS version of this engine, Audi says the RS 3 has the same engine as the TT RS, and Audi's parts catalogue for the RS 3 lists the base engine under CEPA and CEPB — CEPB being the 360 PS version — and the turbocharger, the intake and the cooling system under CEPA alone. The code on the car's own data sticker is the final check.
Where the five came from
Audi tells the story of this engine as a line that starts in 1976. The first five-cylinder went into the Audi 100 that year, with 2,144 cc and 136 PS; in 1979 came the first turbocharged one, in the Audi 200 5T; in March 1980 the quattro was shown at Geneva with 200 PS; the Sport quattro that followed had 306 PS, and in 1994 the RS2 Avant 315. Then the line stopped. The last five-cylinder engines, in Audi's words, "were phased out in 1997."
It came back in 2009, in the TT RS, and Audi's own A3 timeline gives the RS 3's place in that story in one sentence: "2011 The Audi RS 3 Sportback comes onto the market, establishing the legendary five-cylinder engine in the compact segment."
The award
The International Engine of the Year jury gave this engine its class, 2 to 2.5 litres, in 2010 — when the TT RS was the car it came in — and again in 2011, when Audi's announcement named the RS 3 Sportback and the TT RS as the cars it powered. The jury's verdict, as Audi published it: "It is a powerful, visceral reminder of the original quattro rally racing engine that put Audi on the map."
Audi's five-cylinder went on to win that class every year until 2018 — nine in a row, Audi counts. Those later wins include the redesigned engine that followed this one, so the nine are not all this engine's. The first two are.
What quattro GmbH built around it
- The gearbox. A seven-speed S tronic twin-clutch, standard on every car: there was no manual. Audi describes three shafts and two partial gearboxes, two automatic modes, paddles on the steering wheel, a tall seventh gear, and launch control.
- The four-wheel drive. Audi called it "quattro permanent all-wheel drive", and then described something more specific: "an electronically controlled multi-plate clutch, mounted at the end of the propeller shaft", with a pack of plates bathed in oil and an electric pump that raises the pressure when an axle slips. PistonHeads calls it a part-time system, and the buying guide explains why that matters to you.
- The front wings are made of carbon fibre-reinforced plastic.
- The chassis. 25 mm lower than the standard A3, a widened 1,564 mm track, MacPherson struts at the front with aluminium key parts, and a four-link rear axle on its own subframe.
- The wheels and tyres. 19-inch, with 235/35 at the front and 225/35 at the rear — wider at the front than at the back. CAR thought the RS 3 "must be one of the few cars in the world" set up that way.
- The brakes. Ventilated discs, 370 mm at the front — drilled, joined to aluminium caps by hollow pins and clamped by four-piston calipers — and 310 mm at the rear.
- The Sport button sharpens the throttle and opens a flap in the exhaust. The stability control has a Sport mode and, in Audi's words, "can be switched off entirely for circuit use."
- The instruments. A Driver's Information System that "displays boost pressure and oil temperature and doubles as a lap timer."
Audi's figures for the result: 1,575 kg, 0–100 km/h in 4.6 seconds — "a best-in-class performance figure", Audi said in 2011 — and a top speed governed at 250 km/h.
How many there are
We have not found a published production total for this car. Audi gives one figure for every RS 3 generation together — "almost 80,000 units" between 2011 and 2024 — and that is not a figure for this one. What the British press did report is that the first allocation for the UK, 500 right-hand-drive cars, sold out, and that Audi released another 250 in 2012. That is a UK number, not a world number.
What it is not
It is not the last of anything, and we would rather say so than let a sentence sound better than it is. Every RS 3 since has kept a five-cylinder: the second generation from 2015, with 367 PS and later 400, and the third from 2021. What the 8P is, in Audi's own words, is the car that established the five-cylinder "in the compact segment" — and it did so with the engine as it was first built, with the iron block and the direct-only injection. Audi's later 2.5 TFSI, the 400 PS version, has an aluminium crankcase and, by Audi's figure, is 26 kg lighter.
How the figures in this guide work
How much work each job is, not what it costs. Every point in the buying guide carries an effort — an hour or two, half a day, a day, two or three days, or a week or more in the workshop — and, where it is clear, a line saying whether the money sits in the part or in getting to it. Where a source gives a labour time, that is there too. On this car that is rare, and the guide says so each time.
There are no prices, and that is deliberate. What a job costs depends on which country you are in and which workshop you walk into, so a figure we cannot verify is worse than no figure. If you want an amount, ask any workshop one question — what is your hourly rate? — and every effort in the buying guide becomes your own number, in your own currency.
None of this is advice about one particular car, because we have not seen the car you are looking at. Have every one of them inspected before you buy, by someone who knows this engine and this gearbox.
The six questions that decide whether this car is a good buy
These cars are now fourteen or fifteen years old, and on this model most of what the sources warn about is not in the engine. It is in what comes after it. Six questions.
1 · The gearbox — has it been serviced, and does it shift cleanly?
Autocar's and PistonHeads' buying guides both raise two things about the S tronic: its servicing and its control unit. It has its own oil and, by Autocar's account, its own filters, and both magazines want to see that the service has been done. And the gearbox has a control unit, the mechatronic, whose failure has a recognisable set of symptoms. What those symptoms are, and why none of them is something to wait out, is in the buying guide.
2 · The quattro clutch — has it been serviced, and does it actually work?
The four-wheel drive depends on a clutch with its own oil, its own filter and its own pump, and all three need servicing that is easy to forget. There is also a simple test that tells you whether the clutch is doing its job, and you can do it on the test drive.
3 · How has it been used?
This car has launch control as standard, and PistonHeads says that many have been "mercilessly ragged, and sometimes on a cold engine too." Autocar warns about what multiple launches do to the drivetrain, and tuners like the car. None of that rules a car out. All of it changes what you check.
4 · The first seconds of a cold start.
The engine has two timing chains, and Autocar names an early warning that the chains and tensioners are wearing — one you only catch if you are there when the car is started. So you want the first start of the day to be yours. What the oil history has to do with it is in the buying guide.
5 · The brakes — and the Audi campaign behind them.
Owners complained about squealing, juddering and poor braking in the wet, and Audi answered with a service action. Whether it was done on the car you are looking at, and what has been fitted since, is a short question with a useful answer.
6 · Has it been crashed?
Autocar is direct about the bodywork: "Corrosion is likely to be repair-related." The front wings are not steel, and Autocar found a car for sale that had been written off and repaired. Knowing where to look takes five minutes.
What the answers add up to
On a car whose gearbox and quattro clutch have been serviced, that starts cleanly and that has not been crashed, an owner gets through mostly small jobs in the first two years — an hour or two at a time, a few half-days. The heavy items on this car are few, and they are known: the gearbox's control unit, the timing chains, and a driveline that has been used for too many launches. That is something you can check before you buy, rather than something that ambushes you afterwards.
That is only useful if you know what it is made of. The buying guide takes each of these six apart, adds the things that are simply fifteen years old, and says for each one how much work it is, what tells you about it at a viewing, and whether it has to be done now or can wait. It comes with a card you print and take with you, in the order you use it — including the two moments at a viewing that come only once.
Which years, which specification
This is a short chapter, because there is very little to choose between.
When. Audi revealed the car by press release on 22 November 2010; the press reported its first public appearance at the Geneva show in March 2011, and the first cars went to dealers in the spring of 2011. Audi Hungaria's own timeline puts the start of series production in 2010, and Germany's ADAC lists the model from April 2011 to October 2012. Say 2011–2012 and you will not be wrong.
One body, one engine, one gearbox. A five-door Sportback, the 2.5 TFSI, and the seven-speed S tronic. There was no three-door, no saloon and no manual. Autocar puts it simply: the model "spans just two years and, but for specials such as the Exclusive edition, was unchanged throughout that short time", which means, in their words, that "year of registration is less important than condition, provenance and specification." We found one Audi campaign for the RS 3 itself, and it is about the brakes; two British recalls of the A3's airbags can also apply to an imported car. All of it is in the buying guide.
Keep the three RS 3s apart
Three generations share the name, so it is worth knowing what belongs to which.
- First generation (8P), 2011–2012 — this guide. Sportback only, 340 PS, iron-block engine, 19-inch wheels with wider tyres at the front.
- Second generation (8V), from 2015. 367 PS, later 400 after an update in 2017, and from 2017 a saloon as well as a Sportback.
- Third generation (8Y), from 2021. 400 PS and 500 Nm.
Two things you may see in an advert that do not belong to the 8P. Ceramic brakes: Audi's 2010 text for this car lists ventilated discs of 370 mm at the front and 310 mm at the rear and mentions no ceramics; ceramics appear on a later RS 3. And 280 km/h: Audi's 2011 texts give the RS 3 a governed 250 km/h, and the optional 280 km/h belonged to the TT RS.
How to tell a real one
Bumpers and badges can be bought for any A3, so check the things that are built in rather than bolted on:
- Front wings in carbon fibre-reinforced plastic, flared over the wider front track.
- 19-inch wheels with 235/35 tyres at the front and 225/35 at the rear.
- Black four-piston front calipers with RS logos, and drilled front discs behind them.
- A flat-bottomed RS steering wheel, the Sport button, and a Driver's Information System that shows boost pressure, oil temperature and a lap timer.
- The S tronic — a manual RS 3 of this generation does not exist.
- The engine code CEPA on the data sticker or in a decode of the chassis number.
What the specification can be
In the UK, Audi's launch list made the following standard: sports seats in Fine Nappa leather, the flat-bottomed wheel, the Sport button, rear parking sensors, climate control, DVD-based navigation with MMI functionality and xenon plus headlights with LED daytime running lights. What was standard in other markets we have not been able to establish, so check the car rather than the brochure.
The options worth knowing about: front bucket seats, which PistonHeads identifies as Recaro CS seats and calls the ones you ideally want, because the standard seats "leave a bit to be desired in terms of side support"; Alcantara for the interior; roof rails; styling packages in black or matt aluminium; and paint to order. The standard wheels have a machine-polished titanium-look finish, and black wheels with red rim inserts were an option.
Beyond that, look for a car nobody has modified. The original software, the original exhaust, the factory wheels. On this car that says less about the owner's taste than about how the car was used — and the buying guide explains why that matters more on this car than on most.
What it is worth
This is the hardest thing to establish on your own, and it does as much as anything to decide whether you buy well. We are not going to give you a price list — it varies by country and by month, and an out-of-date number is worse than no number. We are going to give you the method.
On this car, the history and the use set the price. Autocar's advice is that the year matters less than "condition, provenance and specification", and on an RS 3 provenance means two things: whether the gearbox and the quattro clutch have been serviced, and how the car has been driven. Two cars with the same mileage are not the same car if one has invoices for both and a standard engine, and the other has a stamped book and a remap.
There are three kinds of car for sale, and each one deserves a different offer.
The documented car. Full history with the gearbox and quattro clutch services on it, a standard car, an owner who knows what was done and when. Asking price at the top of the market, usually justified.
The tidy car with no paperwork. Drives well, looks good, and the owner says it has always been serviced. The hardest of the three, because the fluids you most need to know about leave no trace you can see.
The project. Known faults or modifications, priced accordingly. Be more careful here than you would be with a cheaper car: an S tronic with a fault in its control unit is not a project, it is a diagnosis you need before you agree anything.
How to set the three against each other. Take the asking price, work through the questions in this guide — and the lists in the buying guide, if you have it — and add up what is coming in the first two years. Call that the entry price, and compare entry prices rather than asking prices.
Price a modified car separately, and a car with a damage history separately again. Autocar found a car for sale in the UK that had been written off and repaired, with "no requirement for the repair to have been independently inspected", and PistonHeads says there are "a few 'damaged repairables' out there."
And the options move the price. Autocar noted that specifications "improve noticeably with options such as wingback seats, Alcantara interior and the smarter diamond-cut rotor arm alloys." In the same guide it counts the "wingback bucket seats" among the "rare options" on the cars it found.
Where to look: your country's big classified sites, the Audi and VAG specialists, the auction sites — and, for a right-hand-drive car, the UK. Follow the market for a month before you go and see anything. You do not need a list price; you need to know which cars sell quickly, which sit for months, and at what price.
What it is actually like to own one
It is a five-door hatchback that does 0–100 km/h in 4.6 seconds, and most of the time it behaves like the first half of that sentence. Autocar remembers "the model's lukewarm reviews, most notably from this magazine"; CAR, in 2011, was warmer, and found the steering had "little feel from the wheel" but "clarity and linearity", a ride that, "despite being firm, isn't harsh", and brakes that were "very strong and easy to modulate." PistonHeads, looking back in 2019, calls the steering and chassis "probably the RS3's weakest area." You will notice the firmness before anything else.
The engine is the reason. CAR: "The turbo'd five-pot sounds great, whistling and warbling, and making a hard-edged growl at high revs." The torque arrives at 1,600 rpm and stays, so it is quick without effort, and the Sport button opens the exhaust flap when you want to hear it. One owner told Autocar that the car is "quite sedate; you have to get it into the mood" — and also, after 72,000 miles, "I can't fault its reliability and it's versatile."
It is a usable thing. Five doors, up to 1,000 litres of luggage space by PistonHeads' figure, and four-wheel drive. Audi claimed 31 mpg on the official cycle; Autocar's testers managed 28, "and, when in a hurry, single figures only."
Two things to get used to. The traction light: PistonHeads says it needs "hardly any excuse" to flash, and what it means when it does is in the buying guide. And the oil temperature on the Driver's Information System: PistonHeads' warning about cars driven hard "on a cold engine" is the reason to wait for it before you use the top of the rev range.
What it costs you in attention. Not much in the engine, as long as the oil is changed often. More in the gearbox and the quattro clutch, whose oils come round less often than the engine oil and are easy to forget. That is where the money on this car goes, and where the buying guide spends most of its time.
What it gives back. A turbocharged five-cylinder in a compact Audi, in its first form, with a boost gauge and a lap timer on the dashboard. That is not an investment, and this guide will not pretend it is. It is a fast, practical car with a five-cylinder you can hear from the other side of a car park, and once you have driven one you understand why people keep them.
The buying guide — €24
Everything above is what the car is. This is what you check.
Five faults that belong to this car, taken apart one by one, with how much work each repair is and how to tell which of them you are looking at. Fourteen things that are simply fifteen years old, every one with how much work it is, what tells you about it at a viewing, and whether it has to be done now, within a year or two, or not at all. Why rust on this car is mostly a question about accidents, what the carbon fibre front wings tell you, and the two places Autocar asks you to check for water. Why Audi's "permanent quattro" is a multi-plate clutch with its own oil, filter and pump, a test you can do on the drive to see whether it works, and what launch control and tuning do to the parts behind it. The viewing in eleven steps, including the two moments that come only once. The sentences you say to the seller, and how to build an offer out of what you found.
And a card you print and take with you — fifty-eight lines, in the order you do them. That comes as a separate file, because nobody wants to print a whole guide to take a few pages to a car park.
This is what one of the fourteen looks like
5 · Front lower control arm bushes
Half a day plus an alignment, by our assessment
This is the item where Audi's own bulletin saves you money. For the A3 from 2005 to 2013 it says that "creaking and squeaking noises from front axle when driving at low temperatures on rough/bumpy/uneven roads" come from the rubber and metal mountings of the front control arms, "which does not affect the service life and function of the components. This is a normal condition." The same bulletin draws the line: "Track control arm bushings that are completely cracked through should be replaced."
Autocar adds the symptom that does matter: "Clonks and looseness on poor surfaces suggest the bushes are giving up."
Leave it for a creak on a cold morning — Audi says it is normal. Within a year or two for clonks and looseness. Now if a bush is cracked right through, which you see on the lift.
And this is how the card reads
- 1 · Before anybody starts it
- 2 · The cold start · do nothing else, and nobody revs it
- 3 · The engine bay, cold
- 4 · Round the outside
- 5 · Inside, ignition on
- 6 · The test drive
What €24 buys, put next to what it saves
The gearbox's control unit is a day in the workshop by our assessment, on an expensive part, and who does it matters more than how. The timing chains sit at the gearbox end of the engine, according to Audi's own training material, and that puts replacing them at two or three days by our assessment — exactly why the guide tells you how to hear the warning before you buy. And a driveline that has been used for too many launches can mean driveshafts or a propshaft. The guide is €24. It will not stop any of that from being needed — but it does tell you which of them you are looking at before you agree a price, and that is the whole of the difference between paying for a car and paying for someone else's postponed maintenance.
Why there are no prices in it
Because a price we cannot verify is worse than no price, and because a price would be wrong for most of the people reading this anyway. Workshop rates across Europe differ widely, and so do parts prices. A quote from a specialist in one country tells you nothing in another.
What does not change is how much work a job is — that follows from what has to come off the car. So every point in the guide says whether it is an hour or two, half a day, a day, two or three days, or a week or more in the workshop, with a labour figure where a source gives one. And it says whether the money sits in the part or in getting to it, which is what lets you tell a fair quote from a bad one.
If you want a figure, ask any workshop one question — what is your hourly rate? — and every effort level in the guide becomes your own number, in your own currency. One question, and the answer is actually true for you.
How this guide was put together
Because you should know before you pay for it.
- Every fault and symptom comes from a source the guide names, the manufacturer's own documents first. The effort levels are our assessment, unless a source gives the hours.
- Where the sources disagree — on the gearbox filter, on the service intervals, on what Audi's brake campaign consisted of — it says so and shows you each of them. And where we could not find something, such as Audi's European interval for the gearbox and quattro clutch oils, or a labour time for the gearbox's control unit, it says that too, instead of filling the gap.
- The effort of every job is counted item by item and checked against the list before every edition.
- It says as plainly what you can leave alone as what you have to do. Seven of the fourteen age points start from leave it.
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Have every car inspected before you buy by someone who knows this engine. This is general information about the model and not advice about a specific car.