AUDI QUATTRO
An Audi Quattro, but which one - the 80? The 90? The Coupe? None of the above, says Will Holman, it’s the Ur Quattro that you want.
I was lucky enough to own a Quattro back in the days when they were a cheap secondhand car, and about 20 years ago I rang the local Audi dealer trying to buy a part for it. The dealer asked me which car I had. I told him it was a Quattro. ‘Which one?’ he replied. ‘The one,’ I told him. He asked whether it was an 80 or a 90. I tried to explain that it wasn’t either, it was simply the original Audi Quattro. I wanted to tell him it was also the reason he had a job in the first place.
It’s amazing to think that just 20 years after Audi’s masterpiece turned the world of rallying on its head and changed the company’s image from that of a left-field manufacturer of slightly odd cars for architects and weirdybeardies into the manufacturer of the decade, somebody working for a main dealer could be unaware of any of it. Make no mistake, he must have been living under a rock. Anyone else with the slightest interest in cars knows what an Audi Quattro is. Before it blasted onto the scene, and four-wheel-drifted its way around World Rally Championship stages, the Ford Escort Mk2 was still the car to beat. But rear-wheeldrive and a live axle were swept aside by the Quattro’s fivecylinder turbocharged powerplant, permanent four-wheel-drive and allindependent suspension.
The Ur-Quattro (Ur means original in German) first reached the market in late 1980 and remained in production throughout that decade. And it made everything else the company had produced since World War 2 seem rather staid, too. The Audi’s 2144cc, five-cylinder, turbocharged engine pushed its 200bhp to all four corners via an innovative, permanent four-wheel-drive system, a piece of inspired thinking that was dubbed quattro in a flash of marketing genius. Mounted longitudinally, the iron block, alloy headed powerplant also sported an intercooler, and was considered so exciting that marketing types the world over added the ’turbo’ moniker to anything they wanted to imbue with an image of power and exclusivity.
£18,100/ £33,900
As is the way of
