4 CORNERS

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN AUSTRALIA, WE GATHER THE FINEST QUATTROS FROM EACH OF THE FOUR DECADES OF PRODUCTION. OKAY, SO WE BENT THE RULES A TINY BIT...

THIS ALL STARTED with the Audi A1. It was red, with an Audi 80 body, the 200’s five-cylinder turbo engine and the all-wheel drive guts of Volkswagen’s Iltis offroader. Audi engineer Roland Gumpert had convinced his boss, Jörg Bensinger that the Iltis’ all-weather capabilities would translate to production cars, and Bensinger, in turn, phoned engineering head Ferdinand Piëch to sell him the benefits. The rest is history.

The car that changed the world nearly wasn’t called the quattro. That name was the idea of another Audi engineer, Walter Treser, after the previously preferred name, CARAT, for Coupe-All-Rad-Antrieb-Turbo was owned by a perfume manufacturer. Yet the car before us here is, and only ever could be the quattro. Lower case. Mononymous.

Designer Martin Smith’s work has worn the years lightly, the blistered wheel arches and quad ring door decals creating an iconic design language. The quattro font that tracks through the heated rear window element has endured across four decades. This is the last of the ur-quattros, one of only two 20v models that found their way to Australia via personal import. Introduced in 1989, the 20v debuted the Torsen centre diff, which can apportion up to 80 per cent of torque to the axle that can best deploy it. This is a 1991 car, but perhaps we can overlook that detail.