AUDI QUATTRO GOLD PORTFOLIO 1980-1991
Talk about making me wonder where the years went! This book told me that the brilliance of these cars first hit the world 15 years ago. Here am I thinking they've been around for perhaps five years. I've never thought of them as classics; they're too recent! Reading the material in this book opened my eyes considerably. I also started to wonder about the price and availability of second-hand cars, because the message that keeps coming through is about a car that combines the usual thorough German engineering with simplicity of basic design, universality of parts and exciting driving. So I looked up NZCC's excellent price guide, to find that I was about the last person in NZ to discover the desirability of the early Audi Quattros - $28,000 for a Cat A car! (Millers quotes the English price as about £5,000+) For those who don't know much about the Quattro, this book shows what I milestone in motoring history it was when it first arrived. You get this unequivocally from the motoring journalists of the period. These people usually have to carry out some criticism because it 's in the nature of critics, (not surprisingly). They don't get too nasty because they might find job security threatened, of course. But in the case of the Audi Quattro the praise is without qualification. Even the rather dumpy shape is eulogised because of the styling work carried out on it. How about 200bhp from a 2144cc five cylinder motor? All this without shortening the life of the motor compared to ordinary non-turbo cars and without compromising reliability. The four-wheel-drive is a masterpiece of simplicity. The product of Ferdinand Piech, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, every one of the former problems of this form of drive appear to have been overcome - in fact, not only overcome, but improved, ahead of both front and rear-wheel drive vehicle development. I'm not here to tell you about this car, so I'll finish off with a few stats - average 25mpg (from 18mpg to 35.7mpg), top speed of 137mph, 0-50mph in 4.9 secs and vastly reduced tyre wear. (Incidentally, did you know that Audi means 'listen' in Latin, just as Horch does in German? Well, that's who started the Audi company - August Horch!) This book is worth a read simply for the information about an epoch-making car. New Zealand Classic Car August 1995
