AUDI QUATTRO

brands like DKW and Horch. In order to buy an Audi, you had to go to a VW dealer too. Once Audi engineered VW’S postbeetle front-drivers, its products seemed so similar to its parent’s as to render their very existence questionable.

The 1977 VW Iltis 4x4 was yet another example of Audi engineering with another badge on it, until engineer Jörg Bensinger suggested putting its hardware into a saloon – which would then only be sold as an Audi. Bensinger and fellow engineer Walter Treser conceived the new car as the Quattro, a coupé styled by Martin Smith, and developed the vehicle by sending it rallying.

The behind-the-scenes development of the turbocharged four-wheel-drive car proved to be tortuous, with the small Audi team addressing violent rear differential pull and engine overheating, it didn’t show on the rally stage. Early forays in 1980 saw Group 4-homologated Quattros pulling out 20-second lead gaps. A full WRC programme in 1981 installed Hannu Mikkola and Michèle Mouton in the driver’s seat. When the Frenchwoman won the 1981 Rallye Sanremo, no-one in France thought Audi made washing machines any more.

But the legacy of that small team of engineers working furtively in VW’S shadow is far greater. Since 1984, every Wrc-winning car has been four-wheel driven. Even as the short-lived extremities of Group B gave way to production-based Group A and Audi retired from the WRC, all winning cars have continued to follow its formula of front-engined, four-wheeldrive with a turbocharged engine.