Audi quattro - the early years

Press Release

Page 1 - The Beginnings                                                                        

Page 2 - quattro in Motorsport                                                                                

Page 3 - Technology                                                                                         

Page 4 - Marketing and Markets                                                             

 

 

The Beginnings

 

Ferdinand Piëch, responsible on Audi's Board of Management since August 1975 for Technical Development, had given himself the objective to upgrade the position of the Audi brand in the market through the introduction of innovative technology. Far-sighted, bold, competent, and with a team of dedicated specialists able to turn his visions into reality, Piëch was aiming for success.

 

In February 1977 he was contacted by his chassis engineer Jörg Bensinger who, following winter driving tests in Finland with the 75-bhp Iltis offroader, was deeply impressed by the superior traction and convincing handling of this long-legged offroad vehicle. The other test cars and prototypes on the trip, all of them more powerful midrange saloons, had been left trailing in Bensinger's dust. His Iltis led the pack effortlessly; overtaking it was out of the question.

 

Bensinger was immediately thrilled by the idea of implementing a comparable drive concept featuring a far higher standard of motoring comfort in the midrange segment. After all, it was Audi's strategic target to join the topmost brands in the market.

 

Together with Walter Treser, at the time Audi's Director of Pre-Development, Bensinger advised Piëch to start appropriate tests with the Audi 80.

 

Unlike the chassis engineer, however, Audi's Board of Management was looking at a much more sophisticated and, indeed, ambitious solution: the idea was to build a high-power sports coupé with permanent all-wheel drive and the ability to leave the competition behind under all conditions both in motorsport and on the road.

 

Piëch was fully aware of the potential offered by four-wheel drive. After all, his grandfather Ferdinand Porsche had already examined this technology in detail, even building four-wheel-drive vehicles such as a towing vehicle for the Austrian Army, the famous Lohner electric car with four motors on the wheel hubs, and, as his final development along these lines, a Cisitalia racing car.

 

This clearly set the starting point for a challenging and even delicate project. "Delicate" because Bensinger and his team had not even received an official development brief. Using their existing budget and components, and under substantial time pressure, they were obliged to quickly compile new data and information, and to make clear-cut, meaningful recommendations.

 

The new development was based on the Iltis's drive concept, the original idea being to introduce the new drive technology in a homologation model first intended to prove its merits in rally racing.

 

Soon, however, the hand-picked members of the development group operating under maximum secrecy realised that the objective they had been given would not remain their only challenge in giving Audi's advertising slogan of "Vorsprung durch Technik" or  a new meaning and new qualities.

 

The Iltis's components were implanted into a red two-door Audi 80 and the test car referred to within the company as the "A1" (standing for "All-Wheel-Drive 1") was ready to go. The position of the engine and gearbox remained basically unchanged, with Hans Nedvidek, the man who had already built gearboxes for Grand Prix legends such as Stirling Moss and Juan Manuel Fangio, taking care of power transmission to the rear axle. He connected the propeller shaft to the driveshaft of the gearbox, as on the Iltis, initially leaving out a centre differential and therefore again taking the same approach as on the Iltis offroader.

 

The live rear axle, in turn, was replaced at the back of the car by a second front axle featuring the same differential housing as on the Iltis (but leaned down accordingly) and fitted the other way round. This was all to begin with.

 

A 160 bhp turbocharged engine planned later for the Audi 200 served in the first phase of testing to provide the right kind of performance.

 

In September 1977 Project A1 received the official green light from Audi's Board of Management, bearing the usual identification code within the Company: EA 262 - Development Code 262 - and just two months later the concept for series production was ready to go and the trend-setting prototype was cleared for road testing.

 

Always remaining in good spirits, the Development Team kept all emerging technical challenges and possible drawbacks carefully under control. But these factors alone were not enough to give the concept the final go-ahead required for series production: With Audi being a development and production company within the Volkswagen Group, VW held sole responsibility for Marketing and Sales and VW therefore had to examine and, ultimately, approve all development projects. So this is where the final decision was taken on the market potentials of each new product with all its features.

 

To avoid endangering the ambitious project in the Boardroom at VW's Group Headquarters, Audi invited decision-makers to tyre tests at Turracher Höhe in January 1978. This was an important place for all German car makers at the time, Turracher Höhe being the steepest road in Europe and most certainly being snowbound at this time of the year. Ideal conditions for the upcoming demonstration of all-wheel drive offering outstanding qualities and abilities in a midrange car.

 

But although Dr. Werner P. Schmidt, the Board Member for Sales, and Edgar von Schenk, responsible for Marketing, were certainly impressed, they could not really imagine who on earth would want to buy "400 of these things". Convinced beyond the slightest doubt of his "baby's" chances for success in the market, however, Jörg Bensiger spontaneously suggested that he himself would take care of quattro sales, after Professor Ernst Fiala, the VW Group's Board Member for Development, and Toni Schmücker, VW's Chairman of the Board, had given the project their go-ahead.

 

Fiala decided to "hijack" the A1 to Vienna for a weekend, giving it to his wife to try the car out in city traffic - her complaint afterwards being that the car "jumped around quite a lot" when parking and in tight bends. So together with the urgent recommendation to "put a central differential into that thing", Fiala gave Audi the green light for continuing its development project.

 

Easily said - but to solve the problem Audi needed the ingenuity of gearbox expert Hans Nedvidek and his ally Franz Tengler. Always good for a new idea, these two skilful engineers fitted the differential of an Audi 80 behind the transmission, driving this centre differential by a hollow transmission shaft and guiding the drivetrain to the front axle differential through this hollow shaft. The next step was to fit a propeller shaft at the rear end of the centre differential, serving to convey the power of the engine to the differential on the rear axle.

 

So the first configuration ready for standard production was in place. And after a short test on a wet field just outside Audi's Plant, Chairman of the Board Toni Schmücker approved a budget of DM 3 million for ongoing development of the car's high-speed all-wheel-drive system.

quattro in Motorsport

 

quattro is a superior drive system. Very superior. In touring car motorsport, in fact, quattro is so superior that officials had no choice but to consider whether quattro should be burdened by handicaps or even banned! And in this order, this is precisely what major motorsport organisations did – and without undue delay.

 

After all, they did not want Audi quattro to “do its own thing�, and leave all the others trailing in its wake. Rather, they wanted a genuine “show� keeping fans and television excited. And keeping sponsors interested in the sport. They wanted close races for the lead – door to door, wheel to wheel, with just split-seconds in it. One car or brand dominating the others, however, has no place in the “show�. Especially as battles further down the field are not shown on TV anyway.

 

The first measure taken against the quattro’s superiority was weight penalties which hindered Audi’s touring cars. Extra weight means more tyre wear, greater forces acting on the brakes, more fuel consumption, and of course slower acceleration. And with a view to maintaining safety for the drivers, officials, and spectators alike, various components on the chassis and suspension had to be reinforced. Clearly, this deprived Audi of the advantage the brand had achieved. At least on the race track and in rallies.

 

Fast and efficiently operating all-wheel drive is naturally good for all motorists, not just in winter or on wet roads. Precisely this was the point people realised when the Audi quattro demonstrated its first success in motorsport. When held the very first time in 1979, the adventurous rally from Paris to Dakar bore the name Rally Oasis. And just one year later, Freddy Graf Kottulinsky won this endurance test for man and machine in the car category. With maximum output of 130 bhp, his Iltis offroader developed by Audi was certainly under-powered, but nevertheless sprinted smoothly and in superior style across the dunes, over gravel and the roughest tracks, leaving all other four-wheeled vehicles far behind.

 

Freddy Graf Kottulinsky and the men around Roland Gumpert, who was in charge of the team and crossed the finish line in his Iltis in 9th position, all agreed that this drive system was also perfectly suited for asphalt roads, for the most splendid boulevards, and for the race track alike.

 

The first challenge, however, was to present Audi’s revolutionary, high-speed all-wheel-drive system in truly spectacular style. And what could have been a better venue to do this than the World Rally Championship?

 

After barely 30 minutes test-driving the car, the Finnish rally star Hannu Mikkola was convinced: “I have just experienced a convincing view of the future. quattro will change the rally scene once and for all.�

 

Hannu therefore promptly signed a one-year contract, making his Audi debut in 1981 and joining forces with his co-pilot of many years, Arne Hertz. Together with Michèle Mouton and Fabrizia Pons, Audi’s new rally team was all set and for the 1981 season.

 

The Monte Carlo Rally, by tradition the first race each year for the World Rally Championship, gave the expectant Audi team both good and bad news: Michèle Mouton only covered a few hundred metres before pulling out. The problem was water that had got into the fuel – a handicap not even the quattro’s five-cylinder was able to handle.

 

The good news was the outstanding result achieved by Mikkola/Hertz in the very first stage of the race, leaving behind the competition by almost six minutes. Literally stunned by this kind of superiority, Audi’s competitors simply could not believe the supreme performance of the new No 1 in rally racing.

 

Despite this wonderful start, Hannu Mikkola was not able to convert this lead into overall victory. After hitting obstacles at the side of the road quite severely a number of times, he lost his lead and the status quo was reinstated – but only in terms of the result, not in terms of the quattro‘s actual supremacy. Because only a bit later, German rally master Walter Röhrl, definitely no pessimist, made a clear statement on Audi’s new car in front of the television camera: “What we are seeing here is the introduction of innovative technology clearly superior to everything we have experienced so far. I believe that I will also lose to the Audi quattro, they’re simply that much better“

 

In the very first year, seen and announced as a year of testing for future plans and activities, Mikkola/Hertz won the national rallies in both Sweden and Great Britain.

 

The real sensation of the season, however, came from the female team Michèle Mouton and Fabrizia Pons: Driving like wildfire, the two ladies left all their male competitors far behind in the San Remo Rally, becoming the first ladies’ team to bring home a World Championship race in genuine style. The other drivers didn’t stand a chance, the fans went crazy, and the media waxed lyrical.

 

Had this remained the only victory for the two speed queens, people might have put it down to coincidence. But mastered by the tender hands of an outstanding female driver, the Rally quattros left the men behind three more times – in Sweden, Greece, and Brazil, all in 1982. And Mikkola/Hertz left the competition trailing no less than four times – enough to secure Audi their first World Championship.

 

After winning the national rallies in Sweden, Portugal, Argentina, and Finland, Hannu Mikkola and Arne Hertz brought home the 1983 World Championship and, one year later, the Swedish quattro team Stig Blomqvist and Björn Cederberg clinched a double victory, bringing home the driver’s title and, as a result, scoring the manufacturer’s title for Audi, with Mikkola/Hertz finishing second.

 

In 1985, Audi’s advantage had been reduced. The competition had gone all-out to challenge Audi’s production-based concept by introducing design features and technologies developed and conceived for motorsport alone. In the course of the 1984 season, Audi, in turn, had launched the first evolution model of the Rally quattro, the short Sport quattro promising even better performance.

 

Then, in late July 1985 on the occasion of the Argentine rally, another evolution model of the Sport quattro boasting a huge front spoiler and an equally impressive rear wing, made its appearance on the track: the quattro S1. This was the kind of car only a small number of particularly talented drivers were able to handle: maximum output was 450 turbocharged horsepower, a brute force which even the very best could only master with difficulty.

 

Asked by reporters about the S1’s infernal acceleration, Hannu Mikkola had a clear answer: “Just image you’re waiting patiently at the red traffic lights for green. When the lights turn to yellow, you rev up to 8500 rpm and on green you let go of the clutch. The sudden surge of power is so brutal that you think you’ve been hit from behind by a five-tonne truck – it’s simply staggering!�

 

Staggering or not, the quattros increasingly fell behind the young generation of special, purpose-built cars designed and developed exclusively for rally racing.

 

The end of this most spectacular of all rally eras was marked by a tragic accident in the Portuguese Rally: on one of the special stages, local driver Joaquim Santos swerved hard to avoid a pedestrian, lost control of his Ford, and ran right into the crowd of spectators, killing a woman and two children and injuring another 30 onlookers.

 

This accident marked the end of Group B cars, the 1987 season once again being dedicated to production-based Group A cars: Driving an Audi 200 quattro, the all-Bavarian team Röhrl/Geistdörfer put up a remarkable show, exerting a lot of pressure on the competition with their agile four-wheel-drive models, even though they were “only� driving a modified grand touring saloon. And in the Kenya Safari Rally, Audi’s team finally bowed out from international rally racing in genuine style: two Audi 200 quattros entered, two finished; Röhrl/Geistdörfer came first, followed by Mikkola/Hertz.

 

Now the time had come to once again activate the S1: Pikes Peak in Colorado is 4,301 metres high. American racing drivers had been tearing up the 20-kilometre gravel track from down in the valley until just below the peak ever since 1916. And nobody had ever been faster than 11 minutes. This barrier was broken in 1987, Walter Röhrl setting a new benchmark in 10:47.85 minutes in the 600-bhp quattro S1 prepared especially for this mountain race.

 

Thrilled by the media response to this record achievement, Audi’s management decided to aim for new horizons in motorsport. The TransAm Series offered the right setting for demonstrating the superiority of quattro drive, Audi thus entering this racing scene on the other side of the Atlantic in 1988. Three Audi 200 quattros were prepared and modified for the TransAm Series in accordance with current regulations, engine output of 530 bhp being matched against vehicle weight of 1100 kg. Hurley Haywood, the local Audi Dealer in Jacksonville, Florida, entered the Series 14 times and brought home the title in truly supreme style, assisted in some races by his German colleagues Hans-Joachim Stuck and Walter Röhrl.

 

Scoring seven wins in an appropriately prepared Audi 90 quattro, Stuck finished third in 1989 in the US IMSA/GTO Series.

 

While this made the tall young man from Bavaria the most successful driver in this fiercely contested championship, he missed out on the title all the same, since Audi’s Racing Team had not been able to participate in the first two long-distance races in the Series.

 

The following season saw Hans-Joachim Stuck back performing in front of his fans in Germany, driving an Audi V8 quattro in the German Touring Car Championship and winning the title convincingly for both Audi and himself.

 

Entering four V8 quattros and with additional drivers Frank Biela, Frank Jelinski, and Hubert Haupt at the wheel, Audi subsequently set out to defend the title. And this attempt proved successful for the first time in the history of the German Motor Racing Championship, despite the significant extra weight the quattros had to carry on account of their superiority. Frank Biela, the shooting star of the season, thus brought home the German Touring Car Championship in 1991.

 

In the following year Audi’s race-proven quattros ran into hard times in the DTM German Touring Masters. The difficulty they experienced was not on the track, however, but rather at the conference table when the OMS Motorsport Authority claimed that the new crankshaft in Audi’s eight-cylinder was not in line with regulations, although two preceding tests had confirmed that the crankshaft was perfectly legal. As a result, Audi pulled out of national racing and concentrated on racing series outside of Germany.

 

Racing the Audi A4 Supertouring, the Company once again achieved a unique story of success in 1996, winning not only the prestigious D1 ADAC Super Touring Car Cup, but also, with the help of the respective importers, six national championships – in Italy, Great Britain, Belgium, Spain, South Africa, and Australia.

 

Once again, the sports authorities responded, burdening racing cars with four-wheel drive by additional weight of up to 95 kg in order to prevent further victories of this kind. And just one year later the FIA Motorsport Authority put an end to quattro technology in motor racing once and for all. Meaning that from now on Audi quattro has been able to show its merits “only� in road traffic – but all year round!

 

Technology

 

Applying the brakes to all four wheels on a car is old hat in automotive technology. Applying the power of the engine to both axles, on the other hand, was for many years not regarded as the ultimate wisdom and therefore remained a technical concept reserved to offroaders and trucks for quite some time. In other words, this technology was reserved to vehicles required to do their job under extreme driving conditions.

 

This is quite surprising, considering that the advantages of all-wheel drive are at least as significant for the driver of a passenger car. The only thing needed to really start a significant development, therefore, was a kind of “wow� experience. And precisely this experience became reality on a winter drive through icy Finland, pitching the upcoming 170 bhp Audi 200 with front-wheel drive against all its less powerful models in the range and the Iltis, a 75 bhp, long-legged offroader. Because despite its inferior power, the Iltis was easily able in bends to make up for its lower speed on straights, quickly catching up with the other cars and, indeed, usually leaving them behind on winding, serpentine roads and tracks.

 

So it did not take long for everybody to realise that only permanent all-wheel drive was able to get superior power and performance on to the road without problems under all conceivable driving conditions. And reaching engine output of 170 bhp, the upcoming Audi 200 was approaching the limits of conventional front-wheel drive. Indeed, engineers back then believed that 200 bhp was the absolute limit for the car’s joints and steering. And this was not enough to challenge the two leaders in the luxury segment.

 

The decision was therefore taken at a very early point in time in developing the Audi quattro: four-wheel drive it had to be, but permanent four-wheel drive. The option to feed power to one of the car’s axles on demand was quickly rejected for several reasons, in particular because a variable system offers benefits only on rough terrain and on snowbound surfaces.

 

On a dry road, by contrast, variable four-wheel drive usually means disadvantages: Due to the absence of an intermediate differential, the entire chassis and suspension would be subject to unpleasant tension in bends and when manoeuvring. And this, in practice, would mean excessive tyre wear as well as extra fuel consumption, with all drive components constantly remaining in operation in this case, even when only one axle is actually conveying engine power.

 

A further drawback is that the chassis and suspension cannot be aligned and configured in the same way and with the same standard for both conceivable drive variants, the car’s handling and driving behaviour changing every time four-wheel drive is activated or deactivated.

 

With front-wheel drive looking back at a tradition of more than 70 years with Audi, the Company’s engineers obviously had some essential points in mind right from the start. Compared with standard drive – that is the engine at the front, the drive wheels at the rear – front-wheel drive offers a number of fundamental benefits acknowledged by the car industry worldwide and honoured by customers the world over for many years. Indeed, back in the early ‘80s the German Motor Vehicle Registration Office in the city of Flensburg for the first time registered more cars with front-wheel drive than with standard drive.

 

Enhancing the driving safety of the front-wheel drive system and conveying this extra safety to the even more powerful cars with additional qualities was therefore the essential development automatically leading to permanent all-wheel drive.

 

At the same time the existing configuration of Audi’s models with the engine fitted lengthwise offered ideal conditions for all-wheel-drive technology, avoiding the need for an additional transfer box. The only modification required was to upgrade the manual gearbox by adding an additional differential and providing a driveshaft leading to the rear axle. In practice, this meant fewer components, leading to lower weight and lower frictional losses.

 

The use of three differentials provided precisely the perfection Audi sought to achieve from the start with its fast-running all-wheel drive allowing dynamic motoring in bends and preventing the chassis tension typically occurring in an offroader: precisely the right qualities are ensured by the front axle differential, an intermediate differential with locking action integrated in the transmission, and the rear axle differential likewise featuring a differential lock. The intermediate differential plays the main role in the quattro concept by ensuring the right kind of motoring comfort and smoothness expected of an upmarket saloon.

 

Audi’s transmission engineer Franz Tengler, a member of Hans Nedvidek’s technical team, subsequently invented and built the hollow shaft for the flawless interaction of parts within the most compact spaces and at the lowest conceivable weight: the hollow shaft is a 26.5 cm long connecting shaft serving to smoothen the direct flow of power to the rear axle. A heavy converter transmission was therefore no longer required thanks to the particular function of this hollow shaft, and all technical concerns regarding integrated operation of the rear axle soon became null and void. In this very first quattro concept, engine power of 200 bhp was distributed equally to the two axles.

 

Comparing the various characteristics of driving dynamics, this gives the quattro driver a number of advantages over rear-wheel and front-wheel drive alike: Whenever drive energy is distributed equally to all four wheels, the wheels and the car itself are able to build up more side power keeping the car on track. This also means that the driver can take bends much more quickly and enjoy superior safety reserves in the process. And should the driver ever misjudge the radius of a bend, quattro will provide important help in correcting the position and behaviour of the car, supporting the driver in rectifying his mistake by way of its docile, forgiving reaction.

 

The next stage of quattro drive reached the customer in autumn 1986: the self-locking Torsen centre differential operates mechanically, splitting up drive power under ideal conditions at a 50:50 ratio to both axles.

 

Whenever there is a difference in speed between the two axles on account of external conditions, the Torsen differential automatically and with virtually no distortion feeds more power to the axle able to convey higher forces, in the process allowing up to 75 per cent of engine power to go to one axle alone.

 

Two years later, the quattro system was significantly upgraded once again through the market launch of the Audi V8 featuring Audi’s EDS electronic differential lock. This sophisticated system automatically prevents the wheels from spinning and guides excess power to the wheels for even more traction. Power is conveyed consistently to the wheels as long as the driver keeps his foot on the gas pedal.

 

This was also the first model to see a combination of quattro drive and an automatic transmission: For the first time, quattro drive came with two integrated locks – an electronically controlled, hydraulically operated multiple-plate lock in the intermediate differential and a self-locking Torsen differential on the rear axle.

 

In 1994, finally, the Torsen differential was also introduced in the manual gearbox, open differentials controlling the differences in rotation speed with the help of EDS acting on the car’s axles.

 

An ideal feature on a car featuring its engine fitted crosswise was the introduction of the electronically controlled, hydraulic multiple-plate clutch serving as a longi­tudinal lock on the Audi A3 and the Audi TT. This system is commonly referred as the Haldex clutch.

 

In their all-out initiative, Audi’s engineers seek to perfect the incomparable functionality of Audi quattro drive through the use of appropriate differentials and locks, in the process integrating the most sophisticated electronic control systems. And one thing is for sure: the future of this outstanding drive technology which started 25 years ago has only just begun.

Marketing and Markets

 

Whether the name was Audi NSU, Auto Union AG or, as of 1985, simply

AUDI AG, the company remained exclusively a development and production operation until Organisation Units for Marketing (1991) and Sales (1993) were added. Up to that time, Audi’s parent company in Wolfsburg – Volkswagen – was responsible for developing and creating all marketing pro­cesses. The fact remains, however, that Audi’s engineers were by no means disinterested in this exciting area of business, which often enough set the bench­mark for the success or failure of a new product development.

 

Without sophisticated market research, but with a good feeling for what the mo­torist is looking for or what he or she would certainly not want to miss out on in the foreseeable future, the men and women in the TE Division (“TE“standing for Technische Entwicklung or Technical Development) actively, dynamically and successfully started turning a marketing wheel which the professionals in Wolfsburg only had to confirm and endorse in its qualities. And even though the specialists in Ingolstadt were not always happy with the decisions taken in Wolfsburg, they gained increasing recognition in the course of time, especially after Ferdinand Piëch took over the Research and Development Division in Ingolstadt in August 1975.

 

At the time Piëch, just 38 years old back then, was consistently guided by a clear goal: to escape the limitations of mediocrity, to progress to a supreme position in the industry. In this era of new development, “Vorsprung durch Technik� served both as an advertising slogan and as the Company’s internal guideline: whenever financially feasible, outstanding technical solutions were seen by Audi’s managers and leaders as their obvious choice – also in the case of projects not destined for cars one day to be sold by the Audi brand, such as the Iltis offroader offering driving characteristics and handling so exceptional that it subsequently initiated the development of Audi’s high-speed four-wheel-drive concept. Indeed, it was the superior traction of the Iltis offroader, as well as the safety reserves consistently maintained under all driving conditions, which ultimately paved the way for Audi’s successful strategy leading the company all the way to the top.

 

But while the Iltis was certainly a fine achievement, it never became a best seller. It was, however, good enough to make history in later Audi models. Starting this process was difficult for the very reason that there was no other car which could have set the standard for the Audi Quattro.

 

In contrast, an attempt made by the Jensen brothers in Great Britain to achieve success in the mid-60s with the Jensen Interceptor, a stylish and dynamic coupé featuring Ferguson four-wheel drive, proved to be a failure, the project not bringing home the success in sports motoring Jensen had hoped for.

 

Even back then, a mere dozen four-wheel-drive protagonists at Audi led by Project Manager Walter Treser realised that “the car we are planning to build must hit the road with a ‘big bang’. It must convince the market not through loud slogans, but through its visible success. “And Ferdinand Piëch added to this by emphasising that “we must force the competition to follow in our footsteps, to copy our strategy and concept“. So this is how marketing was once conceived and created by Audi’s engineers working in their private offices.

 

All this ultimately resulted in the PSC Product Strategy Committee, a group of specialists focusing entirely on facts, figures, and perspectives. For this is the input providing the basis for decisions on how to open and penetrate the market with a new product.

 

Back in 1979, the good results achieved in demonstrating the new drive system to the top-level Board Members of the VW Group tipped the scales in favour of Audi, which back then stood for “Vorsprung durch Technik“ more than any other manufacturer. However, there were still doubts as to the realistic production figure: initially the target specified was 400 units, precisely the number required for homologating the new car for international motorsport. Then this figure was increased to 1,500 and subsequently to 3,500 and even 5,000 units.

 

With all plans being carefully discussed, rejected, re-activated and re-discussed, the Committee finally agreed on a compromise: production of the 200-horsepower five-seater coupe was to take place outside of the production facilities for Audi’s large-series models.

 

This was not least because the quality standards expected of a car in the

DM 50,000 segment appeared impossible to achieve on a production line where the absolute highlight and the most expensive model was the Audi 100. A car which back then retailed for around DM 25,000.

 

The unusual design of the new car still represented a minor uncertainty factor at the time: unlike other Gran Turismo cars in this price segment, the muscular four-wheel-drive coupé, through its unusual design, did not exactly appeal to softies with the licence to cruise up and down big boulevards. Indeed, chief Designer Hartmut Warkuss explained the specific design of the car in clear and convincing terms: “In tough competition, whether in sport or on the road, there is no room for indulgence or gimmicks. On the contrary, the message here is tough and rough – it is clear and straightforward, focusing on the technical highlights of such an incomparable driving machine. “

 

As a result, Audi’s new brand flagship now came with outstanding technical features, unique design, and the endorsement of top management – but still had no name. And once again Walter Treser proved to be the driving force: although finding a name was actually not his responsibility, he started looking for the right term, leafing through trade magazines in the evening and finally finding a term in an American magazine he found truly appealing: the name was Quattratrac, and the term used in the context of a special transmission for a Jeep was forever ingrained in his memory. After all, the name of the new Audi was intended to express the concept of the car’s all-wheel drive, the term “quattro“, the Italian word for four, being just right in his opinion to describe four drive wheels.

 

So the name was put to the test together with various other suggestions, after some of the decision-makers had supported the term “Quadro�. The next obstacle was the Product Strategy Committee in Wolfsburg, at the VW Group’s Headquarters. There the responsible division discussed the term for introducing Audi’s all-wheel-drive coupé in a memorable meeting on 12 November 1979, the name still being described at the time as “not decided yet�. But in reality Audi’s team had already prepared the car scheduled to enter the market, the new model proudly bearing the term “Quattro� with a large “Q� on its right-hand rear corner.

 

The decisive discussion round finally took a close look at the proposal made by the strategists in Wolfsburg. Their suggestion was “Carat�, short for “Coupé-All-Rad-Antrieb-Turbo� (Coupé-All-Wheel-Drive-Turbo). With Treser not being surprised by this suggestion, he countered right away by putting his hand into his pocket and pulling out a bottle of Eau de Cologne bearing the same name marketed by the German cosmetics and deodorant company 4711. Objecting that a trendsetting product such as the new all-wheel-drive coupé should not bear the same name as a perfume used by German housewives, he quickly turned the tables, giving the name “Quattro� its ultimate breakthrough.

 

When the quattro left all exotic cars far behind at its world debut at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1980, just two dozen of these outstanding models had completed final assembly. The first customer cars, in turn, were not scheduled for the market until autumn of the same year. But the quattro nevertheless made its way irresistibly to customers the world over, the initial production volume of 400 units, which Sales had seen as a big challenge, ultimately increasing in time to no less than 11,560 cars sold.

 

The Ur-quattro as it was called later to clearly identify the first model against many other Audi 80, 90, 100, and 200 quattros, had its own world of advertising the most outstanding and challenging rallies the world over. And indeed, wherever the Ur-quattro appeared on the track, it left a lasting impression: clouds of dust, fountains of gravel, and black stripes on grey asphalt showed clearly that this car was very special indeed.

 

The successors to the Ur-quattro benefited from this superiority only in part. For reflecting the car’s extravagant technical outfit, they needed the right kind of convincing advertising: “Something far beyond everyday motoring�, to use the words of German rally racer Harald Demuth in describing the task given to the advertising agency requested to develop the right campaign for the Audi quattro.

 

The result is that legendary ski-jump commercial which countless car buffs and aficionados the world over still remember to this very day – the commercial which hailed the advent of that outstanding Audi quattro advertising.

 

The ski-jump itself was in Finland near the town of Kaipola. It was 78 metres long, with a gradient of more than 80 per cent. Which, obviously, was no problem for Harald Demuth and the Audi 100 CS carefully secured at the bottom of the ski-jump. This almost incredible example of supreme traction was of course – as required – far beyond the reality of everyday motoring.

 

Other famous commercials convey the same message: grandpa and grandson Eskimo out hunting – the traces of a bear, the paws of a wolf, and finally the tracks of a tyre in the eternal ice: “Quattro�, says grandpa – and all his grandson does is nod in awe.

 

Another example is the reception given by an Indian Maharaja which probably will have to be cancelled because heavy monsoon rain has prevented many diplomats from coming to the event. Indeed, the only one who makes it is the German ambassador in his Audi quattro. Although, to be honest, even he has to call in advance, telling the Maharaja that he will be late – because he is picking up his Japanese colleague on the way.

 

quattro is a powerful brand with a powerful position in the market. Ever since the introduction of this superior drive system, more than 1.8 million people the world over have opted for an Audi with this unique, high-speed all-wheel-drive system.