Re: Sport Quattro (humor)

[dmiller@iea.com (Doug Miller)]

>   Doug,
>
>     Consider yourself very fortunate!  You got to drive one of the rare and tr
>ue beasts!  Sport Quattro's, especially the short wheelbase ones called "shorti
>es" in the Rally circut.  There are only a hanfull of these in the country and
>probably only about 50 of them worldwide.  They range in price from $65k to $10
>0k for the street legal models, and I figure most race models belong to Audi or
>Volkswagen AG or are in museums.  Just curious, do you know how much the Sport
>Q's went for when they were new?  About the same or less?  Just curious.  And,
>what was GM doing with a Sport Quattro?  Sounded like fun!
>
>                                                           Later,
>                                                           Dan

No, I have no idea what that thing went for at the time. Wow! I didn't know
how few there were of those things. GM at the time was trying to figure out
where the industry was going with AWD and we had quite a little fleet of
cars soon after this happened to evaluate them.  Most were from other
countries and imported unchanged under special EPA/DOT waivers.  This thing
was a race model, and must have been on loan from the Audi Rallye program
(harness, fire extinguisher, illegal tires and lights, etc.  While working
on GM's AWD program, we spent a great deal of time at the proving grounds
on Jennite (simulated ice), and on the street.  To this day, I have a white
dress shirt with globs of rubber on it hanging ceremoniously in the closet.
I was screwing around with the Quattro one day on the Jennite (a strip
about 100 feet wide and a half mile long).  The water truck had just rewet
it, and I wanted to see how many times I could spin the Quattro down the
length of it (sometimes my job was actually as fun as it sounded). I came
at the Jennite at a slight angle hoping to straighten it at the last second
and get the car rotating.  At a little over 80, I yanked the wheel and
miscalculated by about 20 feet, nipping only enough Jennite to get the
thing spinning and returning to dry skipad surface (very grippy) in a
vicious spin.  The Quattro's soft rallying tires started spewing melted
rubber all over and I had the windows down due to the 90 degree day.
Chunks of it adhered all over my shirt and tie, and I never quite lived
that episode down. Well I did actually, but the episodes that replaced it
would be another post.

See ya,

Doug Miller