Fair enough, implying that you thought hatch-width tyres & FWD offered superior traction over barge-width tyres & Quattro was equally "trolling" of me. Back to the matter:
I presume you watched the F1? Think about those onboard heli shots that look directly down as two cars follow each other out of turn 2/3 and along the straight.
Even though a Merc is much (by real world standards) quicker in a straight line, a Redbull will still appear to pull away and increase the gap from 1 to 10 car lengths out of a slow corner along a straight. Before the Merc starts to visibly decrease the distance between the two cars it first has to overcome the effect of increasing distance (due to being on the throttle later) associated with increasing velocity and a constant time gap. (The constant time gap comes from the cars being, say, 0.1 second apart at the corner exit).
As has possibly been mentioned there are loads of other things that could have been in your favour. You also have a decent idea of how to drive & I'm sure have a lot of confidence in the car's ability. Non "car people" seem to do an array of bizarre things, e.g. shifting 3k before the redline even when driving quickly. Then there's that "S4s only make 12 BHP due to carbon build up" thing. To a lesser degree with Quattro and I imagine DSG there's also tyre quality, gear shift times etc.
