There’s a popular line of thought among those who seek to make a convertible from an existing model: the more expensive the donor vehicle, the less imaginative you have to be.
A Bentley Continental GTC is very much a Continental GT without a roof. Much the same can be said of the BMW 6-series or even the Rolls-Royce Phantom drophead, even if it did appear before its coupé sister.
Down in the cheap seats, however, you only need to look at the lengths to which Ford, Renault, Peugeot and Vauxhall have gone to package retractable hard-tops – let alone the balletic engineering of the multi-component roof systems of the Eos or Volvo C70 – to know how much importance they place on doing what they consider to be a proper job.
Audi, by contrast, has taken a diametrically opposed view. Perhaps that’s because a simple, folding soft-top is lighter, easier to package and provides a bigger boot than an unwieldy, space-inefficient and heavy metal roof; or perhaps it’s because Audi knows that the car is not going to be around for that long.
Either way, the result is a car that, according to Audi’s figures, is 120kg heavier than the equivalent A3 hatch. Compare that with the 218kg a Golf GTi gains to become an Eos Sport and you’ll see there are advantages here.
The A3’s Golf underpinnings mean conventional strut suspension and a multi-link rear end but in Sport trim, as featured here, the ride height is dropped by 15mm.
There are four engines to choose from at present – 1.8 and 2.0-litre petrol motors and 1.9- and 2.0-litre diesels. The larger diesel is predicted to account for half of all sales. Among the petrol-powered cars, it is the smaller engine that’s predicted to outsell the larger by two to one. In any case 60 per cent of all sales, regardless of engine, are expected to be the mid-spec Sport model and it is, therefore, a 1.8-litre Sport that now presents itself for our attention.