Audi News - Original Sport Quattro Designer Feels Contempt

Blast from the past - Sport Quattro designer feels contempt

      

The famous sports Quattro of the 1980´s still remains the most revered performance car in history! Unfortunately, its designer feels that he might have created one of Frankenstein´s monsters.

Peter Birtwhilste (now boss of Mazda´s European design studio), described the seminal 1980s all-wheel drive performance car as, "bloody ugly" - when interviewed by the British car publication called Autocar.

Three decades ago the short-wheel base Quattro was originally built to serve Class B World Rally Championship homologation purposes. The road going variants was produced in very limited numbers and saw only 200 being sold.

Shortening the wheelbase of the Audi´s 80 series platform to rally competition specifications and packaging the all-wheel drive mechanicals - was Birtwhilste´s greatest challenge. He chopped the seminal Quattro´s wheelbase by 290mm to appease engineers in the company´s motorsport division and said that "Although it did what it needed to do, it looks awful".

At the time, in order to ensure Audi had a suitable base to homologate its awesome S1 WRC competition cars from, they added extended wheel arches, cooling vents, a more rakishly angled windscreen and an aft spoiler.

Collectors consider the short-wheel base Quattro as one of the most valuable 1980s performance cars. The car was powered by a 2.1-litre in-line five turbocharged engine which produced 225kW version.

The question still remains, why Birtwhilste has hindsight criticism of his truncated Quattro creation? As a matter of fact, Audi, is about to do something similar again with its new Quattro concept.

The new Quattro concept was unveiled two months ago at the Paris auto show. The Quattro concept will ride on a shortened RS5 platform, with its wheels spaced 150mm closer together. Powering the Quattro concept will be a 2.5-litre FSI engine (currently used by the TT-RS and recently confirmed RS3 Sportback) which produces 300kW.

Hopefully the new Quattro concept will be a future classic and not have to suffer the same fate as the previous Sports Quattro - being criticized by its creator.

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