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.
We've had a few late nights and early starts and a day of no connectivity but we're back online now. We made it to Red Lodge today after a fantastic drive over the Chief Joseph Highway and Beartooth Pass. The Chief Joseph Highway was as good as ever and we stopped to take a bunch of pics along the way. Still my favorite driving road anywhere. This was the first time I've been able to go all the way across the Beartooth Pass, every other time I've been out here the pass has been closed due to snow. It's a much tighter and twistier road than the Chief Joseph but the views are amazing. Lots of high alpine lakes and views that go on forever. We also found the Beartooth Falls again but this time discovered a trail head that went to the top of the falls. The hike wasn't very long but the payoff was huge, a spectacular view with the water dropping over 100ft down, yes, there were dangling foot shots.
This morning we left Meridian at 7:30 and headed for Driggs, ID. The Northwest Hillclimb Association was running their event in the Tetons this weekend and we were off to spectate on our way to Jackson Hole. We got into Driggs around 1:30 and after a quick stop at the hotel headed in search of the hillclimb route. The main cross street in town heads up to the Alta ski resort which is where the event was taking place. After running up some pretty good twisties we finally found the starting line with a bunch of local traffic waiting to go up. We got in line and just a few minutes later we were up at the resort. We caught the next shuttle down to turn 7 and found a spot on the hill overlooking the corner for pics. We got to see a bunch of run groups come up although we missed some of the more interesting hardware that had run earlier in the day (GT3 and RS4). On our way back from the races we stopped at an overlook and got our first real pics of the Tetons. Tomorrow we'll swap to the other side
We set out today on a week long adventure to test the new coilovers on the grey car. Today we made it as far as Meridian, ID, our normal first stop when heading to the playground around Yellowstone. We were supposed to meet up with Russ but his car wasn't cooperating so hopefully he'll join us in Jackson Hole. We made our way over to the Ram for dinner tonight, fantastic food as usual. Tomorrow we set off for Driggs to watch one of the Northwest Hillclimb Association's events. After that we head to the other side of the Tetons for a night in Moose and then up to Yellowstone, Cody and Red Lodge. We hope to have more pictures and posts along the way :)
