ROBERT COUCHER
The Driver
Audis. I like them. W ho couldn’t love a marque that produces such considered motor cars with the most beautifully designed and crafted interiors? I bet the average Audi cabin is better and more stylish than the average Audi owner’s house. For years an Audi has reeked of subtle taste. Only recently has it succumbed to the German mullet-hair school of bling design, led by Mercedes-Benz with its massive star on the radiator and BMW ’s outsized chrome grilles. Not good.
In the ’50s, Auto Union – which had come out of the merging of Audi, Horch, DKW and Wanderer, with a four-rings logo to represent this union – was producing modest two-stroke motorcycles and uninspiring, smoky cars badged DKW. The factory was in Ingolstadt, home to the Audi marque to this day.
Things have changed since then. Any motorist will tell you that Audi is right up there with automotive aristocrats Mercedes-Benz and BMW, as well as upstart Porsche, as examples of the finest, most desirable German engineering.
Auto Union AG was bought by Daimler-Benz in 1958/59 but the products failed miserably in the Swinging Sixties. Daimler offloaded the enterprise to Volkswagen in 1965 and it was rebranded ‘Audi’, with the polluting two-stroke engines replaced with cleaner four-cylinder jobs. These new Audis, based on the F102 bodyshell of the final DKW two-stroke, were named after their power outputs and sold as the Audi 60, 75, 80 and Super 90. Shamelessly apeing BMW’s Neue Klasse design, they looked modern enough but appealed to conservative types who were after a sensible family car. I know, because we had one.
In the ’70s our family cars would change frequently and, sure enough, an Audi arrived in the garage. It was a white four-door with a shiny black plastic interior. It looked square and dull, and it had a lot more chromework on the front than did the Peugeot 404 it replaced.
Initially our taxi driver (mother) didn’t like it because it had the gear lever mounted on the steering column, a novelty for someone totally uninterested in cars. But she soon got the hang of it and we all soon realised that this F103 was a bit of a goer, certainly a lot nippier than the solid old Peugeot.
It wasn’t without its problems, though. The spark plugs would foul (the front plug ran too cool behind the rad), which I always enjoyed because it meant that father would have to take it out for a blast to ‘clean the plugs’.
We had to take the Super 90 to nearby Jansfield military airfield to fill it up because it would only run properly on high-octane aero fuel. That’s because it had a 10.6:1 compression ratio, which explained why it went so well. While there I could look at all the Harvard trainers and the occasional Mirage jet fighter. Father pointed out that the generators that ran the field guns were powered by detuned versions of the engine in our Porsche 356A. Many a British 356 enthusiast has bought up the obsolete engines over the decades, including one Francis Tuthill.
The Audi Super 90 had another surprise: the throttle would stick open on occasion. This brought a certain frisson to the tedious school run. On the regular morning route there was a notorious roundabout where harassed mums would just pause instead of coming to a complete stop as the law required. There was a rather wellupholstered traffic policeman who rumbled this, so he’d park his Harley Davidson – complete with tank mounted gear lever, which always intrigued me – behind a tree, slouch over it and wait for his morning catch. Criminal mums would pause and he’d wander out into the road with his hand up and issue the fine. One sunny morning the Super 90 decided to attack the roundabout with the throttle wide open. It would be an exaggeration to say that mother blew the moustachioed cop off his Harley as she took the turn at some speed, but he got a wake-up call when an Audi full of screaming children whanged right past him. He finally caught us a few miles down the road after he’d managed to kick his Harley into life. The Audi had pulled over with the engine still revving its nuts off, and mother escaped jail.
Audi really came good with the launch of the Quattro homologation special in 1980. It wanted to liven up its fusty, boring image, and chassis engineer Jorg Bensinger’s four-wheel-drive rally car did exactly that. I witnessed it years later, in the early ’80s and far away from the school run, as I watched Sarel van der Merwe and Geoff Mortimer in their ever-sideways Quattro decimate all opposition on a night stage in the South African Rally Championship. The Quattro became one of the most significant cars of all time, and one of the most successful and outrageous rally weapons. What a car, indeed.
‘THE AUDI SUPER 90’S THROTTLE SOMETIMES STUCK OPEN. THIS BROUGHT A CERTAIN FRISSON TO THE SCHOOL RUN’