Desirable Audis

Audi engineers watched a 75bhp military Jeep embarrass their own far more powerful prototypes on snow and ice — and the entire Quattro project followed directly from that one observation.

A Rulebook, Rewritten by One Car

Few single models have forced this much industry-wide change this quickly. During winter testing in the late 1970s, Audi engineer Jörg Bensinger brought along a Volkswagen Iltis, a lightweight military 4x4 built on Audi mechanicals, purely as a comparison vehicle — and watched it consistently outrun Audi's own considerably more powerful front-wheel-drive prototypes on icy roads, simply because of its permanent four-wheel drive. Making that setup work in a genuine road-going sports coupe meant solving a problem nobody had cracked at this scale: Audi's engineers designed a hollow secondary shaft running through the gearbox, sending power in two directions simultaneously to the front and rear axles.

The resulting quattro launched at Geneva in 1980, priced almost identically to a contemporary Porsche 911 SC, and then went on to win 23 world rallies between 1981 and 1985 — a level of dominance that forced rivals including Porsche's 959 and, eventually, Subaru's and Mitsubishi's entire rally-bred road car lineups to follow the same four-wheel-drive path. Below is the model we've covered so far.

• Audi Quattro Overview — Classic Icon