By Samuel Ee

STEPHAN Verdier was one of the two instructors at this week's Audi Powerhouse event at the Changi Exhibition Centre.

When he is not giving his students driving tips, Verdier is a champion racing driver.

Among other titles, he has won the Pikes Peak Hill Climb in two different classes. This is the daunting dash up the Rocky Mountains course which Audi is famously associated with.

On the other hand, Audi Powerhouse was the launch of three new Audi performance models - the R8 V10, the S4 and the S3 Sportback.

The exclusive two-day event allowed a few Audi owners to get behind the wheel to drive the cars around two courses marked out by the instructors from the Audi Sportscar Experience (ASE) driver training school in Sonoma Valley outside San Francisco.

Unlike Pikes Peak, the sprawling grounds of the Changi Exhibition Centre are as flat as a runway. But Verdier showed why he is a champion driver in the Audi R8 5.2 FSI V10 quattro.

In auto mode with the sport button engaged, he takes off in the R8 and brakes hard and late before the first corner.

Flicking the steering wheel anti-clockwise, he takes the left-hander smoothly before attacking the slalom section, with a quick jab of the brakes just as he negotiates around each set of cones. Then it's flat out through the S-bend and a hairpin turn before a swift return to the starting line.

According to Audi Singapore, only 18 people got to try the three new high-powered Audi models under Verdier and his colleague Emile Boulet's expert tutelage.

Power to the people.

This article was first published in The Business Times.