Sanremo swang song for a pair of champions

Sanremo swang song for a pair of champions

AUTOart 1985 Audi Sport Quattro S1

The tale of Audi’s Quattro rally cars is one of breaking stereotypes, blazing trails, embracing innovation over tradition, and ultimately, revolutionizing the sport. The 1985 Sanremo Rally winner shown here is the final chapter in that tale. The story begins more than four years earlier, in 1981. Audi Sport brought a brand new factory race effort featuring its Quattro all-wheel-drive (AWD) system to compete for the World Rally Championship (WRC). The conventional wisdom of the day said that AWD systems were too heavy and too fragile to use in rally racing, but the team had run a development program in some regional events the year before and now they were ready for the big time. Audi scored its first win in just the second race of the season—in icy Sweden where the extra traction of the Quattro system proved decisive for Finland’s Hannu Mikkola. Suddenly, Audi’s competitors quietly started to question that conventional wisdom.

Later, in Sanremo, Michèle Mouton (the only woman driving for a factory team) put those questions officially to rest by scoring Audi’s second win—and the first for a woman in WRC. Mikkola followed that up with the team’s third win at the season-ending RAC Rally in Great Britain.

1982 brought increased reliability and increased speed as the team squeezed extra power out of the turbo 5-cylinder engine and learned to better cope with the nose-heavy Quattro’s handling. Mouton scored her second win in Portugal and would add two more by the end of the season. Mikkola and new recruit

Stig Blomqvist would each add two more for a total of seven Audi victories in 12 events—and its first championship. For ‘83 Audi reworked the Quattro for the much more liberal Group B rules, introducing the A1 and A2 variants with an aluminum-block inline-5 along with numerous other mods, and continued right on winning—five times in ‘83. But Lancia’s new ultra-light, mid-engine 037 ultimately it edged Audi for the title. Audi fought back in ‘84 by introducing the radical short-wheelbase Sport Quattro with an amped-up engine now making 450hp, and then poached Lancia’s lead driver Walter Röhrl to join a four-driver assault on the title. It worked. The team racked up seven more wins and took both the manufacturer’s and driver’s titles. Audi’s continued success led several rivals to jump on the AWD bandwagon in 1985 with purpose-built, mid-engine AWD cars that were lighter and better balanced than the production-based

Audi. Audi responded with the S1 variant of the Sport Quattro with improved aerodynamics and still more power, but Walter Röhrl’s Sanremo winning S1 shown here in AUTOart’s model was Audi’s lone win in 1985—the last of Röhrl’s career and the last win for Audi in the Group B era.

You have to look pretty deep under the comically wide boxed fender flares, giant wing, mammoth light kit to see the production car underneath, but it’s there. By this time Audi was about the only top WRC car that still had its engine mounted up front in the

stock location, behind its stock style grille. The body panels were replaced with Kevlar to reduce weight but structurally it still had a lot of production parts, including a MacPherson strut-based suspension. The huge wedge-shaped aerodynamic front fenders have little end fences on the top edges to create the maximum downforce to pin the front end and help neutralize the understeer that plagued the Audis from the beginning. Ultimately the Audi team had to overcome it with driving style, violently throwing the Quattro into corners to get the rear end to break loose and rotate. The aero details on AUTOart’s model are beautiful, and really showcase the creativity the Audi Sport team used to get the most out of the

S1. Things like the blocky structure under the rear wing. The lower wing element and trunk panel lift off to reveal a radiator that was relocated to the trunk to help shift weight off the nose. The battery and oil reservoir for the dry-sump system are back there too.

Open the lightweight doors to reveal a complex tubular latticework that served to protect Röhrl and his long-time co-driver Christian Geistdörfer and also to strengthen the unibody structure. The carbon frame racing buckets have soft rubber harnesses threaded through them and similar straps hold the spare tire in place on a rear cargo shelf made by the roll cage structure. Other cool interior details include sheet-aluminum foot braces for the co-driver and a dead pedal for the driver and an impressive array of switchgear and instruments on the dashboard. Also, note the power-shift gear selector. Nowadays those are commonplace but in 1985 this was cutting-edge tech for rally cars, allowing full-throttle shifts using one of the earliest forms of a dual-clutch gearbox.

The hood has vents and louvers that are scale perforated through the hood panel over the location where the turbocharger is mounted in the right front corner. It’s detailed pretty well, and the intercooler plumbing stretches around to the fuel injection manifold on the left side of the motor—hardware that produced an estimated 500hp in this configuration. You can see how far over the front axle centerline the inline-5 sits. There is a beefy brace tying the strut towers together and there are detailed lines for the fuel and brake systems, and ignition wiring too. Most impressively, the hoses to the rear-mounted radiator trace from the sides of the engine block into the firewall, out the corresponding panel under the dash in front of the passenger side footwell, follow along the door frame to the bulkhead inboard of the right rear wheel, through to the trunk and into the radiator.

Flip the S1 over to view the short-wheelbase Sport Quattro chassis. It’s molded in white; that is accurate to how Audi Sport prepped their racecars but the chassis plate itself is only moderately detailed. Much more detailed are the racespec tubular suspension arms and skid plates covering the engine and transmission upfront and the diff in the rear. The wheels are gloss white Speedline five-spokes with the brand stenciled in blue, matching the sponsor livery on the rear quarter panels. The tires are treaded almost like street tires; they are realistic but don’t necessarily look like the race rubber you’d expect to see on a rally car.

In an effort to help the nose-heavy Quattro’s handling, Audi engineers relocated the radiator, battery, and dry-sump oil reservoir to the trunk. AUTOart makes this panel removable so you can clearly see this unusual setup.

The roll cage added much-needed stiffness to the production unibody. Notice the special shift lever. While common nowadays, this was one of the very first dual-clutch sequential-shift gearboxes.

The all-aluminum 2.1L inline-5 engine saw continuous improvement throughout the Quattro’s rally career. In the 1985 S1 it was making 500hp, and the model showcases the large turbocharger in the right front corner, as well as detailed fuel and electrical systems, and lines to the trunk-mounted radiator that pass through the passenger compartment!