Nice Price or Crack Pipe loves us some WRC Group B homologation cars, which brought new life to the venerable series. Today's 5-cylinder Audi Quattro still looks like a white knight, but does it hold any dark secrets?
Yesterday proved a triumph for the knobby little Herald as 82% found its $5K asking price un-pipe worthy. As we noted, that car was an exemplar of simplicity and basic transportation. Today's car? Well, not so much.
When an Audi engineer saw a VW Iltis 4x4 running rings around everything else on the snow, a light went on over his head. Thankful for the additional illumination, he persuaded the bunker-sequestered VW heads to let him develop an all-wheel drive version of the 80, with the potential of exercising the new WRC rules allowing such mechanical complication. The result was the blister-flared Ur-Quattro which not only competed in the WRC time trial events, but ate all the competition like they were Vienna sausages and it was Octoberfest. Not satisfied with dominating the sport, Audi also threw in a woman driver, giving Michéle Mouton a world's first WRC championship for the fairer sex.
Unlike the previous Audi coupe featured here on NPOCP, this car was actually sold in the U.S.- a whole 660 or so of them. This one, leather-clad and with the rubbery five speed, comes to us from 1983- the first year the car was offered in the land of the 55-mph speed limit. Aside from extended bumpers, a catalyst, sealed beams and other minor changes, the cars were just like those plying the autobahns back home in der fatherland. The 2,144-cc turbo five put 160 ponies through that five-speed and on to a variable torque split differential nominally set to 60/40.
This car has a couple of trips up Pike's Peak over 100K on the clock, which seems a little light. It's not fully stock, having lost its steering wheel to a momo swinger some time back, and the Carter-era sealed beams have been ditched for a smooth set of euro-lamps improving both the look and illumination immeasurably. The rest of the dossier reads like the back of an old issue of Road & Track- Koni shocks, Eibach springs, etc, so the car has had some love over the years.
And it could be yours for just a fin shy of ten grand. The white paint is clean, but doesn't show off the muscular flares as well as a darker color would. Still, Audi Coupes of the less barking-mad persuasion are getting rarer on the road these days, so it would stick out, especially as you slide it sideways down that on-ramp and merge into traffic with all four tires biting for grip, sending gravel flying in all directions and slamming you into the seat bolster as you pull the wheel smoothly around and into the slide. . . Sorry, got a little carried away there.
So, would you go in the hole for $9,995 plus tax and license in order to be able to grab this rally racer, or is that too much cash for you to make a union with this auto?
You decide!
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