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:
---
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
were even more uncomfortable, and had varying degrees of horsepower,
but were fun on twisty roads. 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 Audi Sport Quattro--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 proved a revelation when applied to the Sport Quattro.
The
motivation behind the Sport Quattro, of course, was professional
rally--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 Sport 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 version
of the Sport Quattro one of the quickest cars the world had yet seen
from Point A to Point B in real-world conditions.
Few
Sport Quattros were made, and even fewer came to North America; for the
most part, Americans received the non-turbocharged version, the
still-slick Coupe Quattro
, which given its taut chassis, slick body, and all-wheel drive was still one of the great cars of the 1980s.
The photos are courtesy of
Audiworld--which, as one would expect, is a great Audi owner fan site.
--Chris H.
Jason Carpp on December 01, 2008 at 08:04 AM
Now this is the best Audi Quattro I've ever seen.