Audi Quattro: all-wheel drive dominance

22 October, 2015

 

Audi Quattros have a very dear place in my heart. My first car was a 1989 Audi 90 Quattro, complete with five-cylinder 10-valve KV engine. It was fairly gutless, the drivetrain was heavy, and the engine was so far in front of the strut towers that it would understeer terribly. However, the beautiful sound that the slanted five-cylinder engine produced, the traction the five-speed all-wheel drive gearbox gave you, and the quirk of owning an older European vehicle makes it a car that I’ll remember for years to come.

Manuel Leon Minassian has been a fan of the Audi Quattro since he was young. He tells tales of spotting them parked outside his school as a teenager and the feelings it gave him. Now he has his very own Audi Quattro coupe, the UR-Quattro, complete with the 10-valve turbocharged five-cylinder engine — a truly iconic Quattro that is already classed as a collector’s item. Watch the video Petrolicious produced about Manuel’s passion for the Audi brand, and his own Quattro coupe.

A second dose of Dash

When the car arrived in Wellington in December 2018 it was duly taken along for entry certification. Vehicle Inspection NZ (VINZ) found some wrongly wired lamps and switches — not too bad — but, much more significantly, some poor welding repairs. As the structural problems were probed more thoroughly, we realized the previous owner’s restoration would not do and we needed an upgrade. Dash had made it into the country but it would take some time and money before he would be free to explore any of New Zealand’s scenic highways.
We took the car to our new home in Johnsonville in the northern suburbs of Wellington and I pored over the car in detail to figure out what was next. There were lots of new parts on the car and a very perky reconditioned drivetrain but the chassis needed serious work.

Lunch with… Jim Palmer

In the 1960s, Hamilton’s Jim Palmer won the prestigious ‘Gold Star’ four times and was the first resident New Zealander home in the New Zealand Grand Prix on five consecutive occasions. He shared the podium with Stirling Moss, Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren, Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Denny Hulme, Jackie Stewart, and Chris Amon. The extent of his domination of the open-wheeler scene in New Zealand will probably never be matched or exceeded. Yet he’s always been modest about his achievements.