The people who know these things reckon the best time to experience the demands of test driving a car on ice is in the ‘golden hour’ at dawn – before and after the sun rises.
Audi NZ is setting up such an experience on the slippery surfaces of the Southern Hemisphere Proving Ground, an automotive winter wonderland near Queenstown.
The so-called Night Drive is part of a week-long event in August where, Audi says, its customers can push the carmaker’s all-wheel-drive quattro technology “to its limits”.
It’s being held not only to provide Audi owners with new skills at the wheel, but also to celebrate 45 years of quattro, an all-paw innovation that, in fact, started life with Audi engineers 54 years ago, in 1971.
The German carmaker back then was looking for a vehicle that could best show off the ringed Audi badge on the European rally scene. The premier rally championship was dominated by France’s Alpine-Renault and Italy’s Lancia. The Alpine A110 1600 was rear drive; Lancia’s Fulvia 1.6 Coupe HF was front drive.
Audi began working on a front-drive prototype based on a modified two-door Volkswagen Passat. The project was run by chief engineer Ferdinand Piech, later chairman of the Volkswagen Group.
Piech had replaced the Passat’s straight-six engine with the five-cylinder petrol unit he had built, using an earlier Mercedes-Benz diesel as a template.
The Passat prototypes were engineered to find out exactly how much performance such a drivetrain could handle. Testing over the next few years showed the camouflaged cars with their 125kW five-cylinder engines performed pretty well.
But the car’s front wheels were left scrambling when pitted against a test rival, Volkswagen’s Type 183, a 55kW military all-wheel-drive vehicle known as the IItis, or polecat.
The solution soon became obvious: what Audi needed was a car with permanent all-wheel drive and plenty of power.
Its engineers knew that a car sending engine oomph to all four wheels was capable of withstanding higher lateral forces than one with rear- or front-wheel drive. Therefore, its traction and cornering power was superior.
The project got off the ground early in 1977 as “Development Order 262”. It was codenamed “A1”, masterminded by Piech, project manager Walter Treser, and chassis chief Jorg Bensinger.
The prototype was a modified first-generation Audi 80 coupe with a slightly elongated wheelbase and Piech’s five-cylinder turbocharged engine. The rear suspension was a second McPherson front suspension layout, rotated through 180 degrees.
In January 1978, trials began in snow in Austria. The prototype quickly showed how effective it was in such conditions.
But it was a different story on sealed roads. The wife of VW development director Ernst Fiala had been driving another A1 prototype in city traffic in Vienna and complained that the car felt “tense” on tight bends: “The car ‘hops’,” she said.
On bends, the front wheels took a slightly larger arc than the rear wheels, because the A1’s axles were rigidly connected. The wheels needed to rotate faster.
Audi’s developers focused on two objectives: the all-wheel drive had to be permanent, and to function without a separate transfer case and second propshaft at the front.
What followed was the “eureka” moment, perhaps the best illustration of Audi’s advertising catchphrase ‘Vorsprung durch Technik,’ or progress through technology.
Audi’s transmission design chief Franz Tengler hit upon an idea as simple as it was practical: a 26.3cm long, hollow-drilled secondary shaft in the transmission, through which the power flowed in two directions.
From its rear end, the shaft drove the cage of the manually lockable centre differential. The differential transmitted 50 per cent of the power via the propshaft to the rear axle, which had its own differential lock.
The other half of the drive torque was transferred to the front axle’s differential along an output shaft rotating inside the hollow secondary shaft. The hollow shaft permitted all-wheel drive that was virtually tension-free, light, compact and efficient.
The vital breakthrough was that the quattro principle was no longer merely suitable for slow all-terrain vehicles and trucks but also for fast passenger cars – and furthermore for volume-produced models.
All that remained was the name. One suggestion was “Carat”, an acronym of the German for “Coupe All-Wheel Drive Turbo.” Project manager Treser came up with “quattro” – Italian for four.
Said then design chief Hartmut Warku of the name: “We wanted to symbolise a car that stands firmly on the ground. It was meant to put the emphasis on what it was capable of doing, not on what it looked like.”
Audi unveiled quattro at the 1980 Geneva motor show. It was white, weighed 1300kg and based on the existing front-drive coupe’s bodyshell.
But it used a different floorpan to accommodate all-wheel-drive and independent rear suspension. The engine was a development of Audi’s five-cylinder, 2.1-litre unit, making 147kW and 285Nm.
Production began at the end of 1980. Audi had initially planned to build only 400 units to enable the competition car to obtain homologation for the World Rally Championship.
But the revolutionary drive concept and its dynamic performance captivated the public from the very first day, and Audi had difficulty keeping up with demand.
Audi entered two quattros in the WRC in 1981. France’s Michele Mouton drove one to become the first woman to win a stage, at the Rally San Remo. Mouton’s co-driver was Italian Fabrizia Pons. Both women are picture above on a visit to New Zealand in 2008. Pons is nearest the camera.
In 1984, the Sport quattro appeared. It had a shorter overall length and wheelbase and was the homologation model of the new rally car. Its lighter materials reduced overall weight, and its new four-valve turbocharged engine with an aluminium engine block delivered 225kW/350Nm.
Over time Audi improved the car inside and out. The most important technical changes came in 1987. The boosted engine had been bumped up to 2.2 litres to deliver 300kW/470Nm, and quattro now featured the Torsen differential, where worm gear had replaced the manual differential lock. The name Torsen was a contraction of the two words torque and sensing.
The transmission distributed power continuously but instantly diverted up to 75 per cent of torque to whichever pair of wheels achieved better grip. Thanks to the Torsen differential, which only locks up under load, the anti-lock brake system remained permanently available.
When production ended in May 1991, Audi had built 11,452 Quattros, 224 of which were Sport versions.
• The Quattro A1 Group B rally car that brought Audi its first manufacturer’s WRC title in 1982 was sold in Britain in 2015 for around NZ$500,000.