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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.

Lunch with … Cary Taylor

11 September, 2024

Many years ago — in June 1995 to be more precise — I was being wowed with yet another terrific tale from Geoff Manning who had worked spanners on all types of racing cars. We were chatting at Bruce McLaren Intermediate school on the 25th anniversary of the death of the extraordinary Kiwi for whom the school was named. Geoff, who had been part of Ford’s Le Mans programme in the ’60s, and also Graham Hill’s chief mechanic — clearly realising that he had me in the palm of his hand — offered a piece of advice that I’ve never forgotten: “If you want the really good stories, talk to the mechanics.”
Without doubt the top mechanics, those involved in the highest echelons of motor racing, have stories galore — after all, they had relationships with their drivers so intimate that, to quote Geoff all those years ago, “Mechanics know what really happened.”

ROTARY CHIC

6 September, 2024

Kerry Bowman readily describes himself as a dyed-in-the-wool Citroën fan and a keen Citroën Car Club member. His Auckland home holds some of the chic French cars and many parts. He has also owned a number of examples of the marque as daily drivers, but he now drives a Birotor GS. They are rare, even in France, and this is a car which was not supposed to see the light of day outside France’s borders, yet somehow this one escaped the buyback to be one of the few survivors out in the world.
It’s a special car Kerry first saw while overseas in the ’70s, indulging an interest sparked early on by his father’s keenness for Citroëns back home in Tauranga. He was keen to see one ‘in the flesh’.
“I got interested in this Birotor when I bought a GS in Paris in 1972. I got in contact with Citroën Cars in Slough, and they got me an invitation to the Earls Court Motor Show where they had the first Birotor prototype on display. I said to a guy on the stand, ‘I’d like one of these,’ and he said I wouldn’t be allowed to get one. Citroën were building them for their own market to test them, and they were only left-hand drive.”