adriangroom

Took the beast to the stealer and coerced a tech into coming out for a drive to hear the noise... he reckoned it was steering/drive related.

Booked it in under warranty so they could check it out (and have the opportunity to leave greasy hand prints all over the interior and exterior - it's always like Spiderman's crawled through a barrel of oil and gone walkabout all over the car whenever I get it back... premium dealer or what... anyway, I digress).

Got the vehicle back the same day, problem solved. Apparently it was the offside (UK, right hand drive) rear handbrake shoe (or actuator or something like that) that when hot was catching against something else and making the clacking sound.

I put the car into lift mode and crawled under to see if I could see what they had been talking about but the neighbour's cat was trying to take advantage of my prostrated position so I couldn't concentrate and make sense of all the wires, pipes, cables and everything else under there (there's more engineering on one wheel hub and suspension set than there was on the entirety of my first car).

Just received my pirate copy of the Audi Q7 workshop manual (on disc), so gonna load that and look at the technical diagrams to try find out what it was exactly.