Did you get it before the extra tax on cars worth over £40k kick in? Can't remember what year that started!
To be fair your car does look nice in all the pictures you have posted and as you have said you don't see the colour very often.
Yeah I found that with mine, petrol wasn't ott and even doing short trips to work and in and out of town I was getting around 30mpg which is more than I get with this A5 coupe! The S3 was a manual so maybe that helped a bit. Also the tyres on the S3 were still the original ones when I sold it with just under 18,000 miles on it....the A5 needed wo new front after 7,000!!! Looking back I wish I'd kept the S3...just the colour made me change early