If you're looking for a road to nowhere in particular, you can hardly do better than Route 165 toward Carbonado, Washington. The narrow two-lane flirts with the Carbon River for a few miles before vanishing into Mount Rainier National Park. The road grows tighter, hugging canyon walls that were cut by the river below over eons. The S3 is nervous over the uneven pavement, skipping and bouncing across bumps and dips.

Seattle and the surrounding country is an oil painting in earth tones, a world hung in muted greens, blues, and browns. The S3 fits in like a firecracker, its blister-red paint shouting at the wan clouds in an inanimate act of madness. The dirt splayed down the car's flanks looks like a half-hearted attempt at camouflage.

I'm here because the Pacific Northwest is unlike anywhere else in the country. The gnarled roads of Washington flick from pavement to gravel in a breath and stay soaked with seasonal rain. And because the locals enjoy a gem of a track tucked just outside Tacoma. It's the perfect place to make full use of 292 turbocharged horsepower in the 2015 Audi S3.

One part sedan, one part marble launcher.

This is a harder version of Audi's A3. Everything's a little sharper and more taut, and on the smooth stuff, the car swims in a sea of grip. Even bouncing and contorting over this tortured road, the S3 delivers confidence. There's a stone wall to my left and nothing but a Jersey barrier between me and a 300-foot drop on the right, and I'm carrying more speed than I probably should be.

It's late October, and the Washington coast is gearing up for a long, dreary winter. The day I arrive, the weather's clear, possibly the last sunny day for months. Everything's wet. Rain from the night before mixes with conifer litter and lemon-yellow aspen leaves to coat the road, the pavement fringed by encroaching moss. It's a traction nightmare for anything with wheels or feet, a special kind of hell for sports cars.

My test car checks every box on the S3 options sheet, including the all-important Performance package with its magnetorheological dampers. I have the system cranked to its stiffest setting in anticipation of glossy sweepers, but a century of hammering from trucks laden with coal and timber have turned the chip-seal surface violent. I dial the suspension back and the S3 softens up enough to keep my kidneys out of the ravine.

To build this engine, Audi engineers shoved a platter of parts at the A3's transverse-mounted 2.0-liter four, including a reinforced block, a new cylinder head, tweaked pistons, and beefier connecting rods. The result is 292 hp and 280 lb-ft of torque. Chomp down on the throttle and a pair of baffles open in the exhaust. The sound is subdued but purposeful, popping and crackling in a deep-throated trill with each throttle lift.

The power comes on quick, and it's more than you'd expect from a car this size. Torque starts in the basement, arriving at 1900 rpm and continuing right up to 5300. It's the kind of big, no-drama torque something with more cylinders and more displacement would produce, and it's part of why the car's such a willing accomplice.

During testing, the S3 cut a 4.4-second run in the 0–60 dash. It puts the Audi in sniffing distance of a heap of hero cars—the BMW M4, Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG, and Cadillac CTS-V are all within an eyelash of that time. It'll also put delinquent all-wheel-drive rivals like the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution and the Subaru WRX STI facedown on the mat. Is this what happens when you grow up? You wear nicer clothes but never stop working on your haymaker?

The road makes an abrupt right and tightens to a single-lane steel bridge over the Carbon River. We're gaining elevation now, winding past a few straggling driveways before the surface turns to gravel. Evergreen curtains line the way, strangling the sunlight down to ribbons through the timber.

If the S3 gives up anything in the way of traction, it's hard to tell from the driver's seat. That ridiculous grip is ever present, even over large, wet marbles. Do something stupid like romp on the throttle, and the car will launch your fool self forward. The road unfurls, wide and straight, and I blister the distance at a shade below 90.

Strung out and singing over a long thread of dirt, it's hard to miss the familial chords humming under this thing. You can feel them vibrating somewhere beyond the comfortable leather interior and quiet cabin, playing the same notes that slung Walter Röhrl and his S1 to victory all those years ago.

The car is flat and stable. Unperturbed. I briefly wonder how long a road I would need to top it out, then my sanity returns and I wake the brakes. The S3 feels unsettled, wiggling its hips as the wheels talk among themselves to figure out who has more traction. The speed falls off and the road constricts, tightening into intricate switchbacks as I reenter the forest.

The S3 doesn't want to slide. It wants to dig in, turn, and fire out the other side, like the road was paved with spray adhesive. It's quick, but it's not entertaining. Rotation only comes with big, committed lifts of the throttle or brake. It takes more effort than it's worth.

I'm in the shadow of Mount Rainier, and the snowy peaks peer through gaps in the forest canopy. They materialize from the clouds to stand clear and bladelike against the blue sky. When I cross the national park boundary, the road is closed to everything but foot traffic. It may be autumn in the valley, but there's already snow in the pass, and the forest service has shut the road for winter. There's nowhere to go but back the way I came.

I stop the car, kill the engine, and open the door. Water and bits of gravel fall from the Audi's underside as damp air cools the cabin. The pianissimo plink of the exhaust joins the chorus of forest sounds in concert around me. It seems like a shame to have come so close to snow just to have to turn around. I eye the map. Chinook Pass is on the other side of the mountain. It's 20 miles by crow but more than triple that by car. I have nowhere else to be.

Route 410 gets lonely past Enumclaw. Bull elk poke their noses from between the firs lining the tarmac. The forest out here seems too dense to accommodate their broad, fractal antlers, but they paw through the underbrush and onto the pavement anyhow.

The road gains elevation as it tucks along the White River, undulating and curving with each whim of the water below. The transmission is a bit underfoot. Audi only offers American buyers one transmission in the S3, a six-speed dual-clutch. The slight delay between paddle actuation and gearchange, coupled with a whiff of turbo lag, makes for a driving experience that feels a little out of step. One of us is always dragging the other around the dance floor.

I find my snow just past the 123 junction, huddled in the crook of Chinook Pass. It's as if I've jumped forward three months in time. The temperature hangs at freezing. Jagged stone appears and vanishes through the fog as the two-lane tumbles back on itself and continues to climb. I turn off the navigation, and the screen recesses into the otherwise plain dash, offering up a little more windshield. It's easy to forget how rare such an unobstructed view is.

I'm still amazed at the grip. The pavement's soaked; the Continental ContiSportContact summer tires are cold and hard. There's understeer here, but most buyers will never see it. When you do overcook a decreasing radius, the brakes can bleed off a tremendous amount of speed. The front rotors are up an inch over the hardware on the A3, and the back discs have grown by an inch and a half. Clamping down on those suckers is like trying to crush a block of hickory with your big toe.

In the valley, the S3's steering felt out of sorts: artificially heavy in Dynamic mode and too detached in Comfort. The system comes together in the tangled intestines of 410. Up here, precision and feedback mean the difference between getting to dinner and getting to chat with the crew of a rescue helicopter. A stone wall sits inches from the shoulder, and there's nothing but loose rock and determined conifers between me and the canyon floor. The road is a wonder, contorting in pain, agony, or both. The S3 feels like it wants nothing more than to spend the rest of its days stalking the apexes of this Alpine facsimile.

The next day, it's pouring rain as I head south on I-5 toward Olympia. After threading my way over the aimless roads of the inland, I want to see what the peninsula has to offer. It's the Olympus Rally's stomping ground, a nest of dirt roads painted against the impossible backdrop of the Pacific Northwest.

I barely see any of it before the sound of broken metal takes root in the dark of my stomach, a sinking feeling, dense and unnatural. The dash is a spectrum of flashing warning lights. Dysfunction is here. The four still hums its impatient idle, wondering when we're going to get back to slinging gravel.

I thumb the start button and let the motor go quiet, the pulse of the cylinders replaced by the arrhythmia of fat rain on the Audi's roof. I open the door, breathe in the damp evergreen smell of Lake Cushman, and step into the cold. The exhaust ticks itself cool as I round the car and spot it: the right front wheel kicked over at an impossible angle, wrenched out of socket by a rock the size of a large house shoe. I look closer and see the delicate arch of a suspension knuckle split in two, the threads of bolts unearthed from the cast aluminum.

Denial grabs me by the scruff. After so many hours of bashing across unforgiving roads, it seems unthinkable for the S3 to have been undone by a lump of stone that waited 55 million years to catch me sliding around in a gravel lot. The S3 has so much of its rally-bred forebearers stitch-welded into its panels that I can't imagine not taking it to hunt out wicked and abandoned dirt paths.

I'm soaked with cold rain and a wave of mechanical sympathy. I want to take it back, to make it better, and if I had the tools and the parts, I'd get down in the mud and fix the car where it sits. But I don't, so I can't. All I can do is leave the car in the muck and hike far enough to get a cell signal. It pulls at my heartstrings. The S3 is approachable, legitimate speed in a tidy package, and I broke it.

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