The year was 1980 and Gary Numan’s Cars was at the top of the Music charts. In Britain at the time and throughout Europe, fast cars and so called ‘Yuppys’ were the order of the day in what becoming an increasingly competitive and socially divided world, prior to the technological advances brought by the infant information age. At the Geneva Motor Show in March that year a car was revealed that was to technically change the future design of most road cars – The Audi Quattro.
The four-wheeled drive turbocharged road car, rally car and angular designed coupe, stole the show and proved that Audi with the new Quattro really had made ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ a massive advancement through technology. The original or Ur Quattro as it became known, as opposed to subsequent quattro models with a small q, was not the first 4×4 road car; this honour is held by the Jensen FF. However the innovative four-wheel drive system that Audi developed for the Quattro, did away with all the previous problems of additional driveshafts and extra weight. The Quattro team had produced a practical solution that amazed the motoring world of the day and led the way for the development of all modern 4×4 road cars.
Audi in the 1970′s was not the most avant garde of the stoic German manufacturers, however they had a young and enthusiastic research and development team and more importantly, since 1969 the financial backing of owner Volkswagen, which was needed for the Audi Quattro to be born. The seeds of the Quattro had sprouted three years before the car was launched in 1977 when chassis engineer Jörg Bensinger and a team of Audi engineers were visiting Northern Scandinavia to evaluate the performance of another Audi car, the front wheeled drive 100 series saloons.
While there, Bensinger was highly impressed by the performance of a protype of Volkswagen’s Iltis military vehicle which was also being tested under extreme conditions. The Iltis had new four-wheel drive technology and superb handling which easily outmaneuvered all competition in the snow and ice. » Read more: Classic Cars – The Audi Quattro
