This was a private mother-and-son moment that transcended their roles as European automotive nobility. The proud engineer son and CEO of Audi, Ferdinand Piech, parading his new concept sports car to mum, Louisa Piech, on the first press day, Tuesday, October 8, of the 1991 Frankfurt show. Louisa, brother of Ferry Porsche and quietly influential in the running of the family sports car company, absorbed the beautiful, orange mid-engine coupe in all its detail, sat behind the wheel and listened as her son described the concept car. Finally, fully understanding its considerable potential to hurt Porsche, the family company, she looked straight at her son and spoke.
“Ferdy,” she commanded, “Do not build this car.”
They spoke in German, of course, but I was standing close to the pair and next to Austrian motoring journalist Georg Kacher, who provided an instant translation.
With Porsche close to bankruptcy – Zuffenhausen built just 18,963 cars in 1991-92 and, with 968 and 911 sales tanking, only 11,763 the following financial year – Louisa didn’t need to say any more. The idea of a brilliant contemporary rival from an Audi run by a member of the Porsche/Piech family was utterly reprehensible.
For next six weeks the Audi Quattro Spyder dominated the pages of the European motoring press – which continually asked, would Audi build the beautiful sports car? – until, only six weeks later, it was utterly overshadowed by the Tokyo unveiling of Audi’s even more breathtaking, all-alloy, W12 Avus supercar. This was Audi – and Ferdinand Piech – flexing its corporate muscle with two crucial image-building design and engineering achievements, potential examples of what was possible in its critical climb to take on, and beat, BMW and Mercedes-Benz as Germany’s supreme prestige brand. Yet, today, the Quattro Spyder remains largely forgotten.
After the original quattro and the 1983 ‘aero’ 100, Audi wanted to translate its increasing design and technical talents via two show cars. The Avus was pure fantasy, a polished silver extravagance, that drew on Audi’s 1930’s racing cars for its inspiration, with no serious chance of production. So the Ingolstadt’s creative team decided to simultaneously build another, more practical, mid-engine sports car with the aim of a limited production run at an unknown price. Officially, Audi claimed only, “it should be possible to keep to a five figure DM selling price,” though in the months following its unveiling, rumours of a projected 60,000DM price (10percent below the 911) were not denied by Ingolstadt.
Within days of the Frankfurt show, Audi had 3000 firm orders for the gorgeous Spyder, Louisa Piech notwithstanding, enough to force investigation of production and the building of a running chassis. Among the over 500 cars and 200 motor bikes in the Audi Tradition’s museum collection are the original 1991 show car and, to show how close it went to production, the engineering rolling chassis. Ralf Friese, one of two historians who work for Audi Tradition, knows the car’s fascinating story and filled in the details.
The two Audi cars were designed concurrently, but not in the same studio: Martin Smith (who left Audi for Opel before running Ford’s European studios) and J Mays (who in 2013 retired as Ford’s global head of design) were responsible for the Avus while, working in Audi’s advanced Munich studio, Erwin Himmel (exterior) and Peter Schreyer (interior) styled the Quattro Spyder.
After the show, Audi sent both cars to Arizona to be photographed by Peter Vann, then the darling of automotive photography in Germany and Italy. For this exercise the Quattro Spyder was repainted green, leading to suggestions that Audi made two full-sized cars. “We were trying out colours,” Schreyer admitted to me many years later, after he joined Hyundai as design chief, “It was the same car sprayed green.”
What nobody acknowledged at the time was that the original show car was a runner, but only in a straight line. Rails beside the front wheels to support the body, produced a 25metre turning circle. The packaging of the rolling chassis wasn’t much better: the V6 needed to be removed for a major service while the 70-litre fuel tank sat above the gearbox, mounted at the end of the engine.
The tiny, four-wheel drive sports car was powered by Audi’s then new 2.8-litre V6, unchanged from the tune used in the 100, with 128kW and 245 NM of torque, mounted transversely and driving through Audi’s five-speed manual gearbox, and a VW Golf Syncro differential. Friese dismisses the target 250km/h V-max and 0-100km/h in 6.0-seconds as optimistic, even if the car only weighed around 1100kg. Much to the annoyance of Audi’s Neckarsulm-based aluminium experts, then working on the new all-alloy 1994 A8, Naumann preferred to use outsiders IAD, a British contract engineering and design company, for the aluminium body and space frame.
As the Ingolstadt engineers developed the rolling chassis – total budget just 10DM, or around $7.5m – in Audi’s pre-development department under Fritz Naumann, they quickly realised that the 4.22metre long concept/show car needed a significant wheelbase increase if it was to go into production. They stretched the wheelbase by 100mm to 2640mm to improve interior room, while retaining the 1173mm height and modest 1768mm width. The front axle was moved forward, door width increased and the tail end revised. Just one photograph of the now scrapped, blue clay model of the longer car exists.
Happy with their progress and the car’s obvious potential, the big question quickly became: who is going to build it? Audi projected total sales of 25,000 cars over the Quattro Spyder’s life cycle, too small a number to warrant assembly in-house. Instead, they contacted various outside contract assembly companies: Karmann, Valmet (who would later build the Porsche Boxster), Heuliez and, most intriguing of all, Porsche. Just two years earlier, to help struggling Porsche, Mercedes-Benz commissioned the 500E, a V8-powered W124, partly developed by Porsche and assembled in Zuffenhausen at the rate of around 500 a year between 1990 and 1994.
Somebody, today nobody seems to know if the idea came from Porsche or Audi, there was serious discussion regarding Porsche building two versions of the Quattro Spyder. The first, of course, the Quattro Spyder, but the second was be a Porsche. This would be history repeating itself: between 1969 and 1976 VW/Porsche built and sold the mid-engine 914 in four-cylinder VW form and with a flat-six for Porsche, both developed in Weissach by Ferdinand Piech, who then worked for the family company.
Porsche apparently investigated the possibility of using the 928’s V8 engine, but the dry-sump motor was too tall to fit. Instead, the plan was to drop the 911’s air-cooled six into the Quattro Spyder and sell this rear wheel drive version as a Porsche, through Porsche dealers. However, the idea didn’t go as far as building a prototype in Weissach, Porsche’s R&D centre.
In mid-1992, with sales of the B4 Audi 80 slumping along with profits, Audi’s board of directors decided the Quattro Spyder’s return on investment didn’t justify the effort and cancelled the project. Knowing that every Quattro Spyder sold was potentially at the expense of a 911 sale, nobody doubts that subtle pressure from the Piech/Porsche family also played a role.
Says Friese dismissively of the Quattro Spyder, “With its transverse engine, it had nothing in common with anything then in production and didn’t influence anything in the future.”
Audi’s fortunes only picked up with the highly successful 1994 launch of the B5, now renamed A4. A few months later Audi design began work on another sports car, the Golf-based TT.
Those involved still remembered the Quattro Spyder fondly.
“It was the first concept car I was involved with and I’m still proud of the car,” says Schreyer, now President of design management for Hyundai Motor Group” and responsible for the group’s long-term design vision.
Hartmut Warkuss, then head of Audi design, remembers the Quattro Spyder as, “a car that immediately appeared to be very agile, with a high appeal. Sure, it was distinguished by its size, but it also had a certain elegance. And it was actually this that brought it so close to going into production. It could have become an interesting alternative to a Porsche.”
