AUDI QUATTRO
It’s 40 years since Audi launched the seminal Quattro. Octane travels to the Austrian Alps, where the first prototype was tested – along with the military vehicle that inspired it
Celebrating 40 years of Quattro on the Alpine pass where the prototype proved its worth PLUS landmark 4x4s, from Jeep to Jensen
Nearly seven years have passed since I passengered with Hannu Mikkola on a closed-road stage in Bariloche, Patagonia, in a Group B works Audi Quattro A2. The drive celebrated 30 years since Mikkola won the 1983 Marlboro Rally Argentina, and his Drivers’ World Rally Championship victory that same year. The Quattro dominated rallying for seven years, one of the most exciting eras in the history of motorsport before it came to a tragic end. Today’s location is a mountain pass in Austria, at Turracher Höhe, famed for its 23% gradients – it’s one of the steepest roads in the whole of Europe – and as the testing ground for Audi’s Ur-Quattro. That’s the road car, launched at the Geneva motor show on 3 March 1980, pretty much 40 years ago as you read this. And on this snow-covered mountain pass in the Alps, Audi’s engineers demonstrated to those who held the purse strings that a four-wheel-drive sports coupé was A Good Thing. They did it by driving the prototype up that hill. Without snowchains.
I’m driving, this time. Soon I’ll be meeting Roland Gumpert, a key member of the development team that also included Jörg Bensinger and Walter Treser. They’re the men who invented and developed the Quatttro, the drivetrain of which went on to define Audi and its relentless pursuit of
Vorsprung durch Technik (‘progress through technology’), the same drivetrain that made any top-level rally car without four-wheel drive instantly obsolete, and which – gradually – forced rival makers to offer four-wheel-drive saloons, coupés and estates, as well as SUVs, to a market hungry for something it didn’t know it needed. Today, 45% of all Audis are Quattros, and Mercedes-Benz (4-Matic), BMW (X-Drive), even Jaguar (AWD) have their equivalents – yet none has a moniker quite so evocative as Audi’s.
It’s no coincidence that, during those 40 years, Audi has grown from a somewhat obscure (not to mention small), slightly more upmarket offshoot of the VW empire. No longer does it build the ‘Mercedes-Benz for headteachers’. No, for more than a decade it has been one of the world’s largest makers of premium cars. However strange this sounds, it’s doubtful that Audi would have achieved that status without building cars inspired by a military off-roader. And that original coupé, with its characterful, offbeat and thrilling turbocharged five-cylinder engine, instantly became an icon. In one hit, Audi had its own 911.
The military off-roader? That’s the VW Iltis, its name being German for ‘polecat’, a jeep for the German military, itself an update of the old two-stroke DKW Munga
(Mehrzweck UNiversal Geländewagen mit Allradantrieb ,or ‘multi-purpose universal off-road car with all-wheel drive’). The Munga was a crude yet tough little truck, built from 1956 to 1968, that was a product of the Auto Union empire
that had swallowed the original Audi company in 1932 and from which Audi as we know it today began at Ingolstadt back in 1965. That’s when Mercedes-Benz sold Auto Union (of which it had become guardian in 1958), its rights and its plant to Volkswagen, which initially wanted the capacity of the Ingolstadt factory to build more Beetles.
Enough Audi history for now. And we’ll come back to the Iltis as, yes, we have one of those at our disposal here at Turracher Höhe, as well as this fabulous 1982 Ur-Quattro, resplendent in Lhasagrün.
We begin at the bottom of the piste. There’s uncharacteristically little snow lower in the valley, but here, closer to the peak – the pass tops out just shy of 1800m; even aeroplanes at cruising altitude look bigger – the covering feels thick and permanent. People are being towed on sleds across a frozen lake. It’s -10ºC, a ghastly chill when the wind catches your face but made more bearable thanks to deep blue skies that allow the sun to warm your body.
‘Look at that, it’s iconic, isn’t it?’ a British skier calls to his mates. ‘Makes me feel young again, though mine was a bit more battered than that.’ It feels cruel to remind him that this car made its debut four decades ago, though my comment elicits a smile. One thing the passage of time has achieved is to make the Ur-Quattro seem small, such is the way cars have grown in stature, particularly in the past 15 years or so.
I click the door release, familiar to owners of many a VW, Audi, even Porsche’s 924 and 944, ease myself amid the brown plastics and striped velours of the interior – the furry fabric even lines the roof – and settle behind a fabulously dainty, slim-rimmed leather-trimmed four-spoke wheel. The word ‘turbo’ is superimposed over Audi’s four-ring emblem; ‘quattro’ is visible too, etched into the glass of the rear side windows. Otherwise it’s standard 80 saloon in here, all horizontal lines and hard mouldings, a tightly built ensemble of pieces that are trying their best to hide 1970s origins.
That 2.1-litre five-cylinder turbo engine announces itself with a characteristic rumble. First gear is well-defined if a little stiff in action, I indicate (familiar Polo/Porsche column stalk) and pull away on the compacted snow. Not a hint of slip, for which I’d be happy to thank the winter tyres, though I’ve already seen more than one rear-driver struggle on the pack-ice surfaces. This car makes winter easy, and the furnace-like heater plays its part too, thawing out my feet.
Leaving the skiers and the Unimog-towed shuttles behind, I make my way onto the pass. The view across the diamondhard peaks from the top is breathtaking, and the prospect of this winding road mouthwatering. The surface is clear, no prospect of sliding into oblivion despite the vertiginous drop to my right. Time to play.
Acceleration at first seems quite tame, though from above 2000rpm there’s a rush of turbo boost and things quickly become very entertaining indeed. Into second, then third – you need to guide the lever across the gate, which is a little vague – for all the range you need on this road. Half-throttle is rewarded with a fabulously exotic-sounding throb from under the bonnet, rising in a major key to a harder-edged warble by 4000rpm. Foot down some more and it’s a fully fledged growl, the soundtrack a key ingredient of the Quattro experience, a noise made by few other cars (other fivecylinder Audis, a couple of VWs, the odd Volvo, one generation of sporty Ford Focus).
You soon get used to the power delivery. Some speak of turbo-lag but really it feels ‘cammy’, like many a highly tuned small engine: the boost comes in reliably at 2000rpm, so it’s a case of stirring the gearbox to ensure you don’t drop out of the sweet spot, and it’ll rev past 6000rpm, spinning around the clock with decent refinement and alacrity. Audi’s claim of ‘the smoothness of a six with the compactness of a four’ stretches the point a little, but it’s certainly more characterful than a four, and obviously more compact than a six – something Roland Gumpert will subsequently touch on.
Shame the gearshift isn’t more co-operative; it’s a little baulky, particularly from third down to second (it’s too easy to end up in fourth), and sometimes a ham fist will, er, let’s say ‘beat the synchromesh’. Pedal positions to make heeland-toeing easier would be welcome, too; instead, you try to brake all you need before stabbing the throttle while you grab the lower gear and hope your timing works.
Of course, if you get it slightly wrong, Quattro comes to the rescue: this car is pretty much impossible to unstick, though that’s not to say it lacks engagement. Slow into a corner and fast out will find the nose washing out. Better to go in quick, turn in as you back off to tighten the line, then pull your way out from the apex as the turbo surges and has you hooting and grinning your way to the next hairpin.
Iconic? Of course, and not simply down to Martin Smith’s wide-arched reworking of Helmut Warkuss’s original body, though that certainly plays its part and was briefed by Piëch himself. No, it’s the noise, the driving experience, even the techy-sounding name. Quattro, specifically the Ur-Quattro as this original, definitive generation became known, is to Audi as Carrera is to Porsche: the characteristic handling, the exotic soundtrack, even the awkward gearchange and slightly naff interior, they’re all part of what makes this car a symbol of 1980s thrusting young things as much as any 911.
TIME TO CUT away from Alpine Austria to an office in Ingolstadt, Bavaria. Not Audi HQ but the location of Roland Gumpert. He’s the man who masterminded Audi’s four
‘ABOVE 2000RPM THERE’S A RUSH OF TURBO BOOST AND THINGS BECOME VERY ENTERTAINING’
wheel-drive system, originally during his years as the Audi engineer responsible for developing the VW Iltis for the German military. It was marketed as a VW because Audi had no commercial branch, nor any desire for one. And that’s something else we’ll be coming back to soon.
Some might remember his name in association with the Gumpert Apollo, a supercar built between 2005 and 2012 – one of the quickest cars ever tested by Octane’s sister magazine evo. These days he’s developing a credible fuel-cell, one that electrolyses methanol to overcome the dangers and chemical disadvantages of distributing and carrying pure hydrogen, set for launch in the low-volume four-motor Nathalie sports car. Tall, slim and confident, he wears his mid-seventies as easily as he does his tailored jacket and skinny jeans, showing no less of the drive that took him to a ninth-place finish on the Paris-Dakar. In a support vehicle.
‘Quattro began with the Iltis,’ he smiles. ‘I was the head of pre-development engineering and I took a call from Ferdinand Piëch: “Would you like to develop a military car?” I had colleagues from the military who had heard of the DKW Munga, and lots of equipment already existed for it, so it could be a jeep, an ambulance or a fire tender. Its replacement had to be able to fulfil the same role. I found a farmer with a Munga in a barn, it was full of holes, and I took it to a young engineer. It cost me a case of beer to have the body repaired.’
Then the transformation took place. ‘I took the engine and front axle from an Audi 80, so we had a front-wheeldrive military car. It needed to be four-wheel-drive. So I took another of the same axle, divided the gearbox so the differential ran at the rear, and welded the housing. We needed to mount it the other way round to its usual position, and I took a propshaft from a BMW. This was the first fourwheel-drive Audi. In effect, the first Quattro.’
This was in the mid-1970s. Around 20 cars were built for military testing in Trier and, around the same time, Audi was also undertaking winter testing of various cars in Finland: ‘It was during winter testing in Finland that the idea had come for a more powerful engine. We had no capacity to build a V6, and a straight-six would not fit our front-wheeldrive cars, but we could build a five-cylinder on our existing production lines.’
There, in the winter of 1976/77, all the cars, including an Iltis, were driven by various engineers, including Ferdinand Piëch, who was Audi’s technical director. ‘But nobody wanted to drive the Iltis! That was left to me, and all the other cars accelerated away on straight roads. As soon as they had to make a corner, in the snow, I had no problem keeping up. It had to be my four-wheel-drive system.’
And so Gumpert had meetings with Audi chassis engineer Jörg Bensinger, who managed to persuade Piëch of the benefits of four-wheel drive for safety and handling in a road car. And because Gumpert had left his pre-development role to complete work on the Iltis, his replacement Walter Treser was given the task of building the first four-wheeldrive Audi 80. That was in 1977.
‘There was still a problem with the Iltis,’ says Gumpert. ‘It had no centre differential, so it was extremely difficult to steer on tarmac. That would be no good for a road car. One of our engineers, Hans Tengler, had the idea to drill out a propshaft so it was hollow, and would allow another propshaft to run inside it from a centre differential back to the front axle.’ A central differential meant that a road car could run permanent four-wheel drive without any lock-up problems. ‘It worked! You could now drive a four-wheeldrive Audi with a long wheelbase on tarmac. All we had to do was convince the public…’
So Audi entered the 1980 Paris-Dakar Rally, fitting an Iltis trio with 110bhp four-cylinder engines. ‘I had no experience of rallying, but VW gave me Freddy Kottulinsky, and I recruited Jean Ragnotti and Patrick Zaniroli. Kottulinsky won! Zaniroli was second, Ragnotti fourth, after someone sabotaged his car by loosening the wheel bolts. Even the service car finished ninth, and that was driven by me. I rolled the car, I hit a rock and took out the rear diff. Then another rock broke a front driveshaft. So I removed it and locked the front diff. We finished with one-wheel drive.’
With that, Ferdinand Piëch made Roland Gumpert the boss of Audi Sport. The result still sounds incredible to this day: 25 rally victories and four World Rally Championship titles with the Quattro.
‘AS SOON AS THEY HAD TO MAKE A CORNER, IN THE SNOW, I HAD NO PROBLEM KEEPING UP’ - ROLAND GUMPERT
Back to austria, and now the iltis. This 1981 example, in sahara Beige, is a rare survivor of the civilian series of iltis produced in the last year or two of production. Hence the folding fabric roof with integrated folding ‘doors’, a radio, even plush velour seats that could have come straight from an audi 100. and it feels at home up here in the alps. The kind of car you could use to get yourself out of serious trouble in the snow.
The steering is unassisted, the four-speed gearbox controlled by a wand-like lever protruding from the painted steel floor, ahead of the selector lever that engages and disengages the front axle. ahead of you, there’s a combined speedo and fuel-gauge from a Beetle; the steering wheel is similarly sourced. No air-cooled flat-four though. No, power is an audi-VW four-cylinder, an enlarged version of the 1.5 familiar to drivers of Golfs and audi 80s, here with 74bhp from its 1714cc, enough for a top speed of around 80mph.
We won’t be doing that here. There’s an instantly recognisable (and agreeably sporting) burble from the exhaust to accompany the mechanical voicings up front. That gearlever is long but it feels precise and well-oiled, and finds first easily. Moving away, the steering soon lightens up and, while it’s nothing like as accurate as the Quattro’s, at least feels less vague than that of many an off-roader.
The ride is firm and pitchy, and there’s a bit of roll as you flow around the mountain hairpins, the sense of which is heightened by the lofty, upright driving position. Yet this is a vehicle you feel you could comfortably drive some distance, easy to steer, with decent retardation from the brakes and stoic pull even up the steeper part of the pass: you simply have to be prepared to drop a gear and rev the engine a little to keep your momentum. There’s no turbocharged five-cylinder to call upon, after all.
iltis production began in 1978, with the German military choosing it over the more expensive Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen. That was a landmark year for the audi Quattro too. The initial ‘a1’ prototype had combined an audi 80 bodyshell with iltis running gear, and was built in March 1977. By January 1978, it had received a turbocharged fivecylinder engine and the revised gearbox and transmission with centre differential and hollow-shaft drive. according to audi tradition’s historian ralf Friese, the first official tests began at turracher Höhe under the guise of a ‘demonstration of the company’s new policy on testing and authorising tyres’ for Volkswagen’s sales executive Dr Werner P schmidt and Volkswagen’s head of marketing Edgar von schenck.
Engineers briefed the assembled executives at the Hotel seewirt and headed out to demonstrate the car’s prowess – on the steepest alpine pass, and in a place that guaranteed snow. The a1 was the sole test vehicle, and climbed the icy 23% gradient without any effort on conventional tyres (rather than our green car’s winter tyres, hence its slightly later-model wheels) and without snowchains. The test convinced audi executives that development should continue, and in May 1978 Volkswagen’s head of development, Dr Ernst Fiala, gave the ok for production.
The engine was developed, too. The five-cylinder’s initial application in the suave 100 saloon of 1976 saw it making 136bhp on carburettors. The turbocharged 200 arrived in September 1979, producing 170bhp. Only six months later, as the Quattro made its Geneva debut, power was up to 197bhp, thanks to an intercooler, increased boost and electronic engine management. It had taken barely more than three years to get a game-changer from idea to launch.
And it all comes together one last time as I pass the ‘23%’ sign and blast through second gear into third, that fivecylinder growl reverberating from the rockface, the steering feeling alive in my hands like that of few other Audis, the ride supple over the bumps, the whole car dancing through the bends. I even manage to grab fourth, fine so long as you’re travelling at more than 80km/h (50mph), which translates as 2250rpm, right at the root of the turbo’s torque band, and enjoy the delicious burr of its voice – then temptation takes hold, and it’s back to third to overtake a couple of slower cars and attack the last few hundred yards at full pelt, treating the valley below to the kind of noise with which Mikkola and co enthralled thousands of rally fans.
We’re definitely in the right place: the Austrian Alps are the spiritual home for a car engineered and constructed in flat and urban Ingolstadt. Drive the Quattro here and you’re at one with its abilities: on the roof of Europe, it’s a car at the peak of its fitness for purpose, and it’s entirely natural that it would have gone on to define its own rally generation. Four decades on, the legend is deserved.