Estimated Price: £30,000 - £40,000

Audi's Quattro is a legend that re-wrote the form book in International Rallying, as well as causing rival manufacturers to rethink their offerings and was, quite literally, a trailblazer. The story began with Audi chassis engineer Jorg Bensinger, who spent a Finnish winter testing the Volkswagen Iltis - a four-wheel-drive West German military and forest service vehicle - and found it could outperform all other machines on snow, whatever their type or power output. He put the idea of a four-wheel-drive version of the Audi 80 Coupe to the company's hierarchy and, well, you know the rest. The resulting model was launched to great excitement at the 1980 Geneva Salon and then released to European customers later the same year powered, initially by the WR, 2144cc in-line, five-cylinder, 10-valve SOHC unit with turbocharger and intercooler.

Whilst the engineering is pure-Teutonic, the styling was overseen by Yorkshireman Martin Smith who was tasked with turning the elegant but mundane Coupe into the distinctive, flared-arched Quattro charger. This was the first time the mass car market had been introduced to the intoxicating combination of turbo power and four-wheel drive, and the results were spectacular. The road-going Quattro was clearly a success for Audi, with nearly 11,500 cars produced, but it was as a world-beating rally car that the model really gained its fearsome reputation. Throughout the early 1980s until the end of the 'Group B' era, Quattro variants won 23 WRC rallies at the hands of rally legends Michèle Mouton, Hannu Mikkola, Walter Rӧrhl and Stig Blomqvist including two world championships and twice championship runners up.

The car offered here, a 10-valve WR, is finished in Alpine White with a classic grey leather interior and LCD dashboard, and was originally supplied by Motorworld Garages in Oxford on the 10th May 1985 to its lucky first owner, a Mr T Matthews. It's now on offer from seven-years ownership, the last few in dry storage, and has covered some 85,572 miles in total. It's accompanied by its service records displaying a plethora of stamps from the supplying dealer as well as other VAG specialists, an assortment of original documents including its Quattro user manual, the Immobiliser manual, previous tax discs, and nearly every MOT certificate from 1988 until 2021. 
 
These cars had a genuinely transformative influence on the dynamic parameters of modern road cars and this is an opportunity to take ownership of a largely original Audi Quattro, highly innovative in-period and increasingly desirable today.