[urq] (my thoughts on) Motivating Audi to produce Parts

[Mike Fitton]

I'm going to attempt a post here.  I was one of the guys having trouble 
posting, so we'll see...

I'll start by saying that I'm in the middle of a ground-up restoration.  
I'll also say up front that I am not an Audi purist.  I'm on my 4th Audi 
and 6th VWAG product, and I feel a strong sense of brand loyalty right 
now.  I think modern Audis are among the best cars on the planet.  That 
said, there are some other heavy hitters in the automotive world whose 
engineering I have a great deal of respect for.  Honda, Mazda, Volvo, 
and Subaru are on the list.  Even though I like modern (say, early 90s 
and up) Audis, I think they have a lot of technical shortcomings.  It's 
not that Audi couldn't build the car I want; they just choose not to.  
They're more interested in a luxury segment than a sportscar segment.  
That's for the board to decide...I'm just a poor civil servant on a 
computer.

Back to my Quattro restoration.  I want the blue strut tops only 
slightly more than I want the green ones.  What I really want is a 
spherical bearing at the top of each corner.  I don't want a center 
support bearing.  Instead, I want a carbon fiber driveshaft that can 
take real abuse.  I don't want stock swaybar bushings.  I want enormous 
custom swaybars with appropriate polyurethane bushings and hemi-joint 
endlinks.  I don't want original ball joints.  I want custom chromoly 
control arms that accept a generic, maybe Truchoice, ball joint.  I 
don't want stock front fenders.  I want fiberglass A2 replicas, which 
are available.

I could go on.  Basically, I want my car to be the best it can be.  
Mechanical fuel injection, counterflow heads, and oil-cooled K26s fall 
pretty short of "best."  I recently picked up an urS6.  I knew Audis had 
improved in that 12 year difference between my two, but I was astonished 
to see just how much.  It's staggering how far Audi came between 1983 
and 1995.  I suspect I'd feel the same way if I owned a B7 RS4...too 
poor right now, but someday.  My point is, I'm not interested in 
replacing what are by modern measurements crappy broken parts with brand 
new crappy parts.  Let's say Audi makes a run of ball joints for us.  
Then what?  We'll be having this discussion all over again in another 
100k miles.  We can't realistically expect Audi to support our cars 
indefinitely.  We may only feel justified because VWAG has deep 
pockets.  What if we were all Countach/Esprit/whatever-superesoteric-car 
owners?  Then we wouldn't even have that justification.

So I say to hell with Audi.  Their parts supply doesn't have anything to 
do with the fact that I think new Audis are cool.  But it does mean I'm 
on my own for this restoration, but I really can't say I'd have it any 
other way.  A showroom condition Quattro doesn't hold a candle to, say, 
a new STI.  For some of you, that's not the point of owning one.  For 
me, it's exactly the point.  I believe the Quattro was so well-designed 
that it can stand up to any of the modern Japanese hardware with only a 
few relatively minor changes.  Those changes just don't include many 
stock parts.  Think about it...our cars are 20 years old.  In 2025, 
where is today's brand new STI going to be?  I think it'll be forgotten, 
with a small cult following that's as devoted as they are deluded.  
Point of reference: modern day DSM heads.  Sure, there's lots of support 
and aftermarket for old DSMs, but how much longer is that going to 
last?  Mitsubishi's not doing so well in North America, and I wouldn't 
be surprised to see them pull out completely in the next few years.  And 
then all those DSM heads will be wetting their pants in parts supply 
frustration.  And for what?  A car that totally sucks.  At least our 
cars are awesome already.  We have at least that much on our side.  Our 
cars will never be forgotten.

Look what that guy Hap did in the C4 world.  All he did was make a big 
honkin rear swaybar, and now he's almost a household name among those 
that care.  Same goes for Javad Shadzi.  All he did was make a tubular 
header and a fuel-only ECU that didn't shit the bed when faced with an 
odd number of cylinders.  He then built an entire business around that 
initial product, and appears to be doing very well.  If you live in 
North America, and you wanna get nutty on a 5cyl Audi engine, 
particularly a 10v version, "Pay to the Order of: 034MS" is the first 
big check you write.

So let's get dirty and start fabricating/commisioning our own parts to 
our own specs.