Background
I was lucky enough to own a Quattro back in the days when they were a cheap second-hand 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 an 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 weirdy-beardies into the manufacturer of the decade, 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 on to the scene, and four wheel drifted its way around World Rally Championship stages, the Ford Escort Mk2 was still the car to beat. But cart springs and a live axle were swept aside by the Quattro’s five-cylinder turbocharged powerplant, permanent four-wheel-drive and bullet-proof build.
The Ur-Quattro (Ur means original in German) first reached the market in late 1980 and remained in production throughout what is undoubtedly the greatest decade of the 20th century.
Offering a grown-up alternative to the VW Golf GTI we all lusted after and drove if we could afford one, the Audi’s 2144cc engine pushed its 200bhp to all four corners via its innovative permanent four-wheel-drive system, a piece of inspired thinking that was dubbed quattro in a flash of marketing genius.
Mounted longitudinally, the five-cylinder engine was fitted with a turbocharger and an intercooler, a move that at least partly contributed to marketing types the world over adding the ‘turbo’ moniker to anything they wanted to imbue with feelings of power and exclusivity.
As is the way of the world, the Quattro gained capacity and power over the years; first bored out to 2226cc (which gave the same power and torque output but at lower revs), and a later 20-valve DOHC version gave more power and added a little extra to the top speed.
The three engine variants were given individual codes, and these are how enthusiasts now refer to them: the original 2144cc 10v engine was WR, followed by the 2226cc 10v MB, and the 2226cc 20v RR.
But the Quattro was never about outright power; designed to be driven in the sort of adverse conditions that German skiers and world rally champions tended to find themselves in, traction and handling were far more important than sheer grunt. The Mini had proved the advantage of never having to lift for corners and the Quattro emulated this by channelling twice the Mini’s power to each wheel, on snow, ice, gravel and anything else you could throw at it.
And it worked better than Audi could have ever hoped. From the early ’80s through to the end of the Group B era, Quattro variants won 23 World Rally Championship events in the hands of legends such as Michèle Mouton, Hannu Mikkola, Walter Rӧrhl, and Stig Blomqvist. The final tally included two outright World Championships and another two as runners-up.
Nearly 11,500 road-going Quattros were produced by the time the model was retired in 1991.
