Game-changer: Audi's ur-Quattro

Ferdinand Piëch gets things done. Well he's German (OK, Austrian), so that's a given, but he really does get it done, and then some. Audi R8, Lamborghini Gallardo, Bugatti Veyron… all Piëch's work. But for his ultimate achievement, we have to wind the clock back a little further.

Unless you're 12 years old, you will know that back in the day Audis were just slightly more expensive Volkswagens — faintly better alternatives to Opels, basically. These days of course, Audi holds a lifetime membership to the previously Mercedes-and-BMW-only club. It used to be like apartheid, but Audi earned its way in. Guess who's responsible? Yup, that man Piëch, but more accurately, it was the car he created to elevate Audi to world-class status: the original Quattro.

In 1980 when the Geneva motor show's doors opened, the public gawked at the world's first sportscar with permanent all-wheel drive. Every production example was hand-built from start to finish (which explains the astronomical price for the time), and it had to be as the Quattro's simple Audi 80-derived bodywork (except of course for those iconic box-arches) hid some ground-breaking technology. Sure, the five-pot engine may have been merely a VW Golf unit with an extra cylinder joining the party, but Audi fitted a turbo and extracted 200bhp easily, which later jumped to almost 220bhp. The double overhead cams lifted20 valves, and that's about all you need to know there. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that the famous five-cylinder emitted a bassy sound akin to a hound's muffled bark.

It went too: 0-100kph took seven seconds and top speed was an effortless 220kph. That's slow-lane stuff if you find yourself on the autobahn, but then again the Quattro was never intended for straight-line blasts. No, the clever stuff is elsewhere.

The ur-Quattro (ur signifies the ‘original', the one and only, the legend) not only sported fully independent front and rear suspension, but also seriously trick permanent all-wheel drive and lockable differentials. These provided unrivalled road-holding and oodles of driving fun.

The thing is, the original brief called for a car merely capable of handling low-traction surfaces and snow. The performance part of the equation just kind of crept in there. We suspect Piëch had something to do with that…

Anyway, if Audi really wanted to test the Quattro's gravel and snow capabilities, they needed to look no further than the world rally stages. And they didn't, winning immediately in 1981 with 300bhp, and developing the engine for 350bhp and even 450bhp in Group B trim.

But the ultimate is the mad, short-wheelbase Audi Sport Quattro S1 which spewed500 horsepower out of a one-tonne machine. It was a fearsome thing (for its rivals) that helped Michèle Mouton and Walter Röhrl tame and downright dominate the Pikes Peak hill climb.

It's been over three decades since the original changed this company forever, and today just about all Audis come with a small ‘quattro' badge on the back. But for car enthusiasts, Quattro only ever meant one thing — a fire-spitting S1 dancing up towards the Colorado clouds.

Not bad Ferdi, not bad at all.