by David Finlay (6 Aug 02)

Even after a gap of several years I don't want to go into much detail about this, but the Audi quattro 20v remains the car in which I have seen the fastest indicated speed while driving. Shame on me. I'm better behaved now.

Back then the idea of driving a quattro at all was very exciting, and a lot of that excitement came back when I got the chance to relive the 20v experience in one of Audi's heritage cars. I looked forward to it for days, because the original test is still one of my highlights from all the time I've been doing this job. The car just seemed so capable, so powerful, so fascinating, so refined.

It was the memory of the refinement which caused such a shock as soon as I climbed aboard. This particular car was registered in 1990 - can cars really have become so much more comfortable and luxurious in twelve years? It seems unbelievable, though it makes sense if you continue the process of going back that length of time.

A 1990 car still seems quite relevant to me, but go back another twelve years and you're in 1978, a long time before I started driving. We lived in another world then; radios were optional equipment, front-wheel drive something unusual and not entirely trustworthy. Back another twelve years and you're in 1966, a year of which I know nothing except by hearsay. The cars around then would have been considered primitive in 1978, quaint in 1990 and historic now.

I hope that makes sense, but even if it does it's a result of a vaguely logical thought process after the event. The immediate impressions in the quattro were of clumsy switchgear, spindly wipers powered by a noisy motor, and seats which looked sporty but did not offer much in the way of back support (the high biting point of the clutch and the dodgy water temperature gauge could be explained by the fact that the car had done over 71,000 miles, and no doubt pretty hard miles at that).

A Hard Lesson

Realising that all this was quite acceptable in 1990, I then started remembering what life was like back then. I'd been writing about motoring for quite a long time (since I was at school, in fact) but was only just becoming convinced that I really knew enough to write about it. A Grand Prix racer, since retired, had long since told me that there was nothing more he could teach me about driving, but I had more recently had the pivotal experience of meeting John Stevens and realising that I was a complete ignoramus, and would have to re-learn the process from scratch. Within a year I would be winning significant race championships; when I won my first, a contemporary realised that "people like us" could actually do what we had previously thought only our local heroes were capable of - encouraged by this, he won the same title the next year.

Looking back, then, 1990 was in many ways quite inspiring, though it was also the time I first experienced a major betrayal of trust on the part of someone I had thought was a friend. Sadly, that has been repeated several times since.

All this helped me to understand the quattro 20v in its proper context - a 1990 car being driven in 2002 by a driver who was mentally back in 1990. The switchgear and the seats and the obvious ageing were consigned to a box marked "Irrelevant". What now came across was the outstanding capability of this wonderful car. The engine - pleasantly noisy compared with the super-hushed performance units you get today - produces 220bhp, which is still an impressive output now and was tremendous for the day. The manic Ford Sierra Cosworth, still a recent invention, had less, and even the completely bonkers RS500 homologation special could muster only 4bhp more.

The Fords were wild and needed a lot of care. But the quattro 20v was a pussycat. Because that power was distributed to all four corners, none of the tyres had a great deal of work to do. Wheelspin, and the slides which result if it happens on a corner, are virtually impossible to achieve.

Just The One Problem

Only the car's nose-heaviness seriously compromised the handling. The quattro 20v, following Audi tradition, carries its engine ahead of the front wheels, so the centre of gravity is very far forward and gives the front tyres a disproportionate amount of work to do. Turn-in is surprisingly good in the circumstances, but the steering feels slightly uncertain and you don't want to explore the limits of entry speed. And over a series of bumps (I made sure I tried the car on roads which, in another country, would certainly have been closed for rallying purposes) the front suspension occasionally became confused as the shock absorbers went out of synch with the vertical movement of the engine.

Still, even in today's terms the quattro 20v is a remarkable performance car. I can see why it made such an impression on me when it was new. "It's incredible for a twelve year-old car," I said to fellow CARkeys writer John Fife after my drive. "Twenty year-old," he replied. "No, twelve - it was registered in 1990," I argued. "Yes," he said, "but it was the last of the line. It's a development of a car that came out in the early 1980s."

He's right, of course. Audi brought out the original quattro more than twenty years ago, and the 20v was simply the most extreme development of it (other than the short wheelbase Sport models). It had more power, and there had been more time to tinker with the handling, but the basic ideas are more than two decades old. An epoch-making car indeed.

(PS: In case you're wondering if you can afford one, Audi UK is planning to sell this particular 20v. Although it runs well it's not in mint condition, and Audi expects to get £13,000 for it, and to pay £20,000 for a spotless example. The company also owns an unregistered, super-low mileage version; that one isn't for sale, though reportedly people have offered upwards of £40,000 for it.)

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