Audi Quattro, Ur-Quattro, and Sport Quattro

First of all, my apologies for the long Car Lust outage. All of us on the Automotive team spent last week immersed in the wild but incredible nuttiness of the SEMA automotive trade show, a massive and deeply cool show that dazzles onlookers with the latest in automotive trends, aftermarket products, wild customizations, and eye candy, both of the automotive and, to put it politely, non-automotive variety.

The demands of the show, combined with the distractions of Las Vegas (a fitting stage for a flashy and incredibly exhausting show), the rigors of travel, and working through the amount of work that piled up in our absence, mean that Car Lust has been sadly neglected for the last eight business days.

With apologies, here is our resumption:

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In the early 1980s, in a world long before the Subaru WRX and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo became relatively commonplace, performance cars were cartoon characters--two-dimensional caricatures of two broad types. On the one hand were muscle cars, which even in their more contemporary form were uncomfortable and hopelessly out of their depth when the road began to curve. On the other hand were sports cars and exotics, which had varying degrees of power, were fun on twisty roads, but were even less comfortable and usable than muscle cars. Neither type was consistently useful on real-world roads, where rain, snow, and other slick surfaces--to say nothing of the harsh demands of passengers and cargo--made both muscle cars and sports cars nearly useless.

Enter the original Audi Quattro (called the Ur-Quattro by today's enthusiasts to  differentiate it from later Audi Quattros. The Ur-Quattro was a truly revolutionary car that could not only keep pace with the big boys on dry pavement, but forge ahead like a mountain goat once the roads turned treacherous. The combination of all-wheel-drive and turbocharging might be commonplace now, but it was big news at the time--and Audi's polished package proved a revelation. The Ur-Quattro was a completely revolutionary car that kicked off the modern era of more competent, better-engineered performance.

 

The motivation was professional rallying--specifically, the Group B formula that prompted the development of the most powerful and sophisticated supercars the sport had ever seen (including the Ford RS200, a former Car Lust). In that august group of superheroes, the Quattro was Superman--the original, the defining member, the inspiration for later greatness.

Built as it was to cope effortlessly with packed snow, ice, gravel, and mud in a rallying setting, slick pavement on real-world roads proved little challenge, making the street-going Ur-Quattro one of the quickest cars the world had yet seen from Point A to Point B in real-world conditions. It was remarkably good-looking too, with its sculpted long hood, fender flares, and fastback tail. Its purposeful lines raised the Ur-Quattro well above the cars on the road in the early 1980s.

The Ur-Quattro was relatively rare, but it had two siblings, one much more common and one much less. The Audi Sport Quattro was an extremely rare short-wheelbase variant built to homologate the Quattro for competition purposes; roughly 200 were made.

 

More common than the Ur-Quattro and Sport Quattro were the more relaxed, naturally aspirated Coupe GT and Coupe Quattro. The Coupe Quattro and Coupe GT made do without a turbocharger, but given their taut chassis, responsive five-cylinder engines, and slick styling, they were still among the great grand touring cars of the 1980s. Very few Coupe Quattros of this generation made it to the United States; most of the American cars were of the front-drive Coupe GT variety.

 

The photos are courtesy of Audiworld--which, as one would expect, is a great Audi owner fan site. the first photo up top is the Quattro (or Ur-Quattro), and the second picture is the shorter, rarer Sport Quattro.

--Chris H.

Comments

[Jason Carpp on December 01, 2008 at 08:04 AM]

Now this is the best Audi Quattro I've ever seen.