A1/S1 Driving the 1984 Audi Sport Quattro S1 WRC Replica by MTM


The Audi A1 is a luxury supermini car launched by Audi at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show. Sales of the initial three-door A1 model started in Germany in August 2010, with the United Kingdom following in November 2010.

Shining Star

Chicane Challenger



Kids run down the street as we sputter to a stop at the lights, begging us to gun the old-school turbocharged inline-5 just once. And as we roll into the McDonald's lot, the jaws of the locals hit the floor in some kind of cartoon parody. But it was the series of dead-sideways drifts round the traffic island in the street that finally spread the word of the prodigal son's unscheduled and extreme lap of honor round Ingolstadt, its hometown.

The 1984 Audi Sport Quattro S1 rally car had come home to play.

So how did we get Audi to release the centerpiece of its motorsports history, a $500,000 tribute to competition in the World Rally Championship during the glory days of Group B in the 1980s, for a tire-smoking drive on an improvised rally stage through the streets of this old medieval town north of Munich?


Well, we didn't. This isn't one of the original 20 examples of the S1 Quattro that helped make rallying a certified thrill sport and established Audi as a motorsports brand. But it is as close as you're likely to get, because this is a replica from Motoren Technik Mayer (MTM). You could even buy one if you have about $450,000.

Audi Mania by MTM
Roland Mayer's well-known MTM concern is just a stone's throw from Audi's Ingolstadt headquarters in the town of Wettstetten, Germany. Mayer makes his living from producing tuned Audis with near obscene levels of power, but the S1 is his private toy, his passion.

Mayer bought the car from a Finnish enthusiast who had started his own Sport Quattro conversion 12 years ago and then finished it, complete with a carbon-fiber body sourced from some "friends" at Audi Sport. This E2 version of the legendary Audi Sport Quattro S1 is a replica, but it's a little beyond hobby-car status. Audi even invited the car to participate in its official Ingolstadt parade to celebrate the company's centennial.

This replica surely looks the part of a purebred Group B rally car right down to its sponsor decals and the torn bodywork. Rally driver Armin Schwarz even raced it last year and the signature of legendary WRC driving champion and Pikes Peak winner Walter Röhrl is on the battered steering wheel. Then there are the leather straps that hold the flyweight doors in place, a giant competition-type fuse box and even an Audi key fob from the 1980s.

This car might be a motorsports icon but it is also an example of 1980s rally engineering. Roughly converted from a street car as rally cars were, it's square and chunky, and the aerodynamic flips on the bodywork that were the height of rally aerodynamic science in their day add to the cartoonish brutality of the car. Crude though the aerodynamics might seem, former rally team boss Roland Gumpert (who has gone on to build the Gumpert Apollo supercar) reckons the wings were worth more than 1,000 pounds of downforce at high speed.

And at this moment it is vibrating, chomping at the bit and straining at the driveshafts on a disused American military base so large it could be a stage of the WRC all by itself. Audi wouldn't let us do this in one of its museum examples of the S1 Quattro, but Roland Meyer is letting us off the leash with his car.

Killer Bs
Back in 1983, the rules for WRC rally cars were suddenly freed up to accommodate the latest breed of high-performance street cars, and it led to a legendary series of high-tech all-wheel-drive cars with as much as 590 hp and the ability to accelerate to 60 mph in 3 seconds. The Audi Sport Quattro, Lancia 037 Rallye, MG Metro 6R4, Peugeot 205 Turbo and Renault R5 Turbo are legends, immortals from the brief time between 1983 and 1986 when rallying became a media sensation.

The S1 is the car everyone remembers from that time, a version of the original Audi Sport Quattro with a wheelbase some 12.6 inches shorter, wheels 9 inches wide, lightweight carbon-fiber bodywork and an extreme version of the turbocharged Audi inline-5. When Walter Röhrl ran an S1 Evo 2 at Pikes Peak in 1987, it made 591 hp and weighed about 2,200 pounds, giving it the same power-to-weight ratio as a Bugatti Veyron — for racing on a dirt road, no less.

Off the Leash
The whole car rocks as we hit the 4,500 rpm required for a flying start and the ear-splitting shriek from the five-cylinder rattles the cabin. Even Walter Röhrl admitted that the S1 on the starting line in its fieriest form felt like a bomb going off. He's right, as this car offers up violent acceleration that a Bugatti Veyron can't come close to replicating. This is the sudden motion that comes from distilled propulsion, not internal combustion; it's a slam in the back and then you're just gone.

We're riding on Pilot Sport Cup tires thanks to the MTM replica's involvement in the Tuner Grand Prix on the Hockenheim circuit just a few weeks earlier, and there's almost no purchase on the slippery gravel, which peppers the belly pan like machine-gunfire. On asphalt, this car hits 60 mph in 3.4 seconds, which makes it quicker than an Audi R8 5.2 FSI V10. While we're making slower progress on this loose surface, the experience feels a hell of a lot more dramatic than it might in an R8, as the nose of the short-wheelbase rally car weaves back and forth across the gravel track like a security dog sniffing out drugs.


The S1 rally car came with a turbocharged, 20-valve, 2,110cc version of the inline-5 with a special anti-lag turbo and a redline of 8,500 rpm. But for the sake of longevity (and his wallet) Mayer has opted for a simpler setup. He has taken an inline-5 from a Sport Quattro and then built it up with forged pistons, a hybrid T26/27 turbocharger from KKK and then added a number of genuine Audi Sport parts, including an air intake and manifold. With a redline of 7,000 rpm, this engine delivers 530 horsepower at 7,000 rpm and 545 pound-feet of torque at 4,900 rpm without the expense or grief of a competition engine.

It does, however, give us a powerband of just 2,000 rpm to work with, plus very short overall gearing. Top speed on the autobahn is just 130 mph, which seems like a ridiculously low speed in a 530-hp car, but then the Sport Quattro was engineered for bone-crushing acceleration on a mountain road, not top speed.

This Way, That Way
Our day was about to get worse, as we find out when we skate into the grass at the very first bend. When the understeer in this all-wheel-drive car takes hold, you need power to rotate the car around and that means putting your foot down to make boost in the engine. It's a nightmare conundrum, like aerodynamic downforce on a pavement racer, where you have to go faster to make the car corner better. Take the corner at 50 mph and slide wide; take it at 80 mph with the critical revs in hand and somehow the S1 whips through the bend with barely any steering adjustment.

It's believing that such a thing is possible that's the key, and with the trees awaiting any really stupid move, we find it hard to dial in the faith and slap the loud pedal to the floor when it already feels like the car is going far too fast. It's also critical to be in the right gear, and during the 1980s before automated gearboxes became the norm, a good driver was marked by his ability to tap dance on the pedals. And yet that's what the icons did on every single bend, on every single track. They did it on ice, snow, sleet and mud, in the rain and in the dark.

And they learned to trust their steed. Because driven even close to right, the Sport Quattro S1 is sublime, everything you could possibly imagine and more. With just over 2,400 pounds distributed 58 percent front/48 percent rear on this 86.8-inch wheelbase, the car feels almost as light as a Lotus Exige and somehow even more responsive, reacting to the slightest twitch of the wheel.

Everything happens far too fast, and when you're in the hot seat the whole thing is like being inside a whirling clothes dryer. Somehow we stay on the makeshift rally stage, and yet this is really just playing, with soft grass to one side to cushion our transgressions. The stars of Group B were at maximum attack, with a cliff face for company and a wall of spectators lining the road.


We Go to McDonald's
And now the brakes don't seem to work. These are competition pads and they need heat — heat that we can't really build up once we leave our makeshift rally stage for the streets of Ingolstadt. Pressure on the middle pedal elicits a screeching noise and not much else, so it's hard to look suave in a town where not only almost everybody drives an Audi but also works for the company or has family there.

So everybody knows this car, and driving it back through town is like escorting Megan Fox down the red carpet. The brakes squeal and at every traffic light we open the doors to get a blast of fresh air, just the sort of precious creature comfort that was denied to drivers and navigators on the rally stages of the 1980s. Everybody stares, everybody loves it and even the police give an approving smile as we amble past them at legal speed in a dirty road warrior that looks like it has rolled into town fresh from the rally stage.


Kids run after us and in the McDonald's parking lot, we just can't resist an exhibition of speed. Afterward a small crowd gathers a respectful distance away to swap insights into the greatest rally car there ever was.

Sadly, the Audi Sport Quattro S1 never really had a chance to prove itself. It did well, but it hadn't quite got the measure of the Peugeot 205 T16 when Henri Toivonen's untimely death in a Lancia Delta S4 on the 1986 Tour de Corse on Corsica brought the curtain down on the Group B era because of safety concerns.

But that was decades ago, and the shaky video footage of WRC events of the 1980s and tall tales of the car's runs at Pikes Peak in 1986 and 1987 have immortalized the Audi Sport Quattro S1. It is the ultimate rally car.

Edmunds.com/Insideline
 

Audi

Audi AG is a German automotive manufacturer of luxury vehicles headquartered in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. A subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, the company’s origins date back to the early 20th century and the initial enterprises (Horch and the Audiwerke) founded by engineer August Horch (1868–1951). Two other manufacturers (DKW and Wanderer) also contributed to the foundation of Auto Union in 1932. The modern Audi era began in the 1960s, when Volkswagen acquired Auto Union from Daimler-Benz, and merged it with NSU Motorenwerke in 1969.
Official website: Audi (Global), Audi (USA)

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