It seems a blog post is in order now that the arrival of my long awaited TTRS is imminent. The wait actually goes back over 5yrs when rumors first cropped up about a potential mk2 TT with a 5-cylinder engine on Audiworld. I wasn't exactly thrilled with the mk2 design at the time but the thought of getting a new Audi with a class 5-cylinder engine was enough to get me interested. At the time I declared that this drivetrain combination would be the equivalent of beer goggles for the mk2 :)
Of course back in 2006 the mk2 was just a few years old and this was just a rumored powertrain combination. It wasn't until February of 2009 that the TTRS was officially announced, and then not even for the US market. Through 2010 there started to be more rumors of the TTRS being available in the US, including a Euro-spec car being demoed to US press. I got a deposit in at Carrera Motors on July 19 expecting that an announcement would come shortly, I figured the allocations would be limited and wanted to make sure I could actually get an RS once they were finally available.
In early August, Audi launched their Facebook petition to bring the TTRS to the US and after getting over 11,000 petitions (myself included :). In mid-September they finally announced that the TTRS would be coming to the US in limited numbers by Q3, 2011.
On March 19 I was able to switch my deposit to Audi Wilsonville, a new dealership that had opened up in late 2010. My hope that since they were a new and growing dealership was that they would receive early allocations for the TTRS. Of course being local instead of having to drive to Bend was a bonus too :) On April 23 I officially placed my order for my TTRS, although it took several weeks for the order to be accepted due to my choice of color. Many thanks to Scott Mitchell and Scott Larson for getting the order pushed through and accepted. From then it was just a waiting game until I received an allocation, build and finally delivery.
Eventually I received a production week of October 24, delayed quite a bit because of the exclusive paint order. The factory inspection was completed November 21 and the car was sent off to Emden to be loaded for shipment to the US.
Unfortunately it arrived at Emden a bit too late to catch the ship (Mediterranean Highway) that departed on December 2 so it was instead loaded onto the Cougar Ace, possibly seen here. I did manage to catch a pic of it leaving Emden though.
After about a week in transit the Cougar Ace just docked back in Davisville to offload cars for the east coast. I expect it will be there for about 2 days and then off to Houston to unload west coast cars, hopefully including mine :) It should just be a few more weeks before I've got some delivery pics to share.
