Even after all these years, the experience of driving the GT-R is as thrilling and distinctive as it’s ever been. After a quick drive along a flowing, well-sighted road such as the B4391, when you get out of the Nissan you feel completely wired and buzzing with energy, as though you’ve just taken a triple hit of some super-strength narcotic.

Given the sheer size and weight of it, you half expect the GT-R to feel dull and cumbersome but, within the first hundred yards behind the wheel, you’re reminded how sharp and agile it really is. It feels brutally fast in a straight line, pulling with a force that seems to build and build the longer you keep your right foot in, gear after gear. The engine doesn’t have the most immediate low-down response, but the mid range is very strong and the final 2000rpm are just insane. The car feels so much fitter than its official 562bhp power figure.

In corners, too, the GT-R feels so much lighter than it really is, thanks partly to steering that’s quick and surprisingly delicate. Also, the GT-R’s Dunlop tyres claw masses of grip out of a dry surface (if you ever you get the thing understeering on the road, you had better hope your affairs are in order), while the natural chassis balance is actually neutral, which means cornering speeds can be absurdly high. There’s real adjustability in the chassis too, ∆ so you can tweak your line and play with the car’s balance at will.

In outright terms, the GT-R is quicker along a road than the RS5 – it simply has more power and mechanical grip – but if you timed yourself from one point to another in each car, you wouldn’t see much of a difference. Roads have speed limits and suicidal sheep and other users, after all. So in the real world, the Audi isn’t much slower than the Nissan, but it’s just nowhere near as thrilling to drive.

You get out of the RS5 impressed, perhaps pleasantly surprised, but you don’t feel so jacked up by the experience that you just have to jump back in, turn around and blast from one end of the road to the other until the fuel tank runs dry. Let’s call it the difference between a very quick, very competent car, and a truly outstanding one.

To get the best out of the RS5, you have to configure the various parameters correctly. The important one is the steering. If you switch it into Dynamic mode, it becomes completely terrible, with too much dumb weight, far too much inconsistency and no real sense of connection to the front axle. In Comfort mode, it is at least sharp, direct and well-weighted. The drivetrain and sport differential should be switched to Dynamic but the suspension left in Comfort. The firmer chassis mode isn’t intolerably stiff, it’s just more enjoyable to feel the car ducking and weaving a little bit as it does in the Comfort setting. That little bit of extra roll in corners and heave as the car rises over a crest or squats into a compression allows you to read it more clearly, to feel the forces that are acting upon it, whereas in the stiffer mode it becomes a touch inert.