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From YourSITE.com Technical Features It all started with a photo.
The car was basically an early Audi 80 quattro from the looks of it. Here in the US that would be an ’84 4000 quattro, as later cars got a subtle redesign and larger aero bumpers. From the small photo, I could gather that the car had been fitted with 5-lug hubs, 15-inch Fuchs alloy wheels, Recaro seats, Ur-Quattro rear seat and what I’d later be told was a Treser front bumper. It sits in the middle of the Audi Sport garage with ur Quattro rally cars being serviced behind it. This car, probably built for some executive or VIP at Audi Sport, struck me as one of the coolest Audis I’d seen. Ten years passed and I’d all but forgotten about the 80 quattro in that book. August found me in Northern California attending the Monterey Historic Automobile Races where Audi was the featured marque. Strolling through the owner's corral, I stumbled upon Ti Kan’s beautiful, front-wheel drive early 4000. Ti’s car is a pristine silver example with a very rare BBS chin spoiler and otherwise full OEMplus look in his modification direction, long before the OEMplus phrase was coined. Ti’s car got me going on the early 4000 again, creating in my head a blend between Ti’s ride and that 80 quattro on page 217.
By 1999, 4000s had gotten cheap. Earlier ones were becoming hard to come by with quattro. By then, I’d learned that Audi only built the older body style of the 4000 for the United States with quattro for one year - 1984. Searching for one, found a range of cars. There was a 25,000 mile original example in New England for $3,500. Tempting as it was, the collector in me couldn’t bring myself to modify such a pristine car. There were others too, though rust and a price of several thousand dollars kept me from getting very serious. Then one day, while surfing Google, I struck gold. Simply searching “Audi 4000 for sale, Washington, DC”, I came upon a personal website of a guy who had his silver ’84 on the market. It didn’t run, but it was only about 20 miles from my house. My roadside assistance program’s free towing service would more than cover the distance, and at $250 it was hard to say no. Aside from being parked 10 yards from the dumpster belonging to an Asian restaurant, the car looked pretty decent. The smell wafting off of the dumpster had me concerned about the long-term odor of the car’s interior, but I planned on stripping that out anyway so my concerns weren’t all that deep. Transported via flatbed to its new home, my wallet was $250 lighter. The deal seemed pretty good.
Since purchase, I’ve begun the long learning process of disassembling the car for eventual repaint. All exterior trim except the glass and door handles have been removed. From German Ebay, I’ve managed to source two chin spoilers for the car. One is a rare Kamei piece, the other an even rarer BBS spoiler. The Kamei is a more brittle plastic and three pieces, but contours around the car’s lower intake better. The unit from BBS seems both heavier in weight and heavier duty. Both are new old stock, meaning they’ve never been painted. I’ll wait until the car is painted to make the final decision on which will be installed. Like our sister publication VWvortex’s Project Scirocco, this car will be a total rebuild. Not much of the original will be retained other than the body. I’ve played with many different possible build-ups in my head in the two years I’ve now owned the car (yes, I’ve owned it for two years and am just now earnestly working to get it built). Here are some of the build ideas and concept directions I'm thinking about for the car. Some are realistic, some aren’t. Some are subtle, some aren’t. Authentic OEMplus This would mean using primarily Audi parts, sourced over a range of years of build on these cars, with all parts coming from the pre-A4 era from Ingolstadt. From an equivalent year 80 quattro, we’d do European one-piece lights, smaller European bumpers with fog lamps and turn signals built in. I’d love to do an RS 2 engine, oldschool Recaro seats like the Sport quattro and a Sport quattro dashboard if one could be found. I’d also like to do 5-lug conversion and Fuchs 5-spoke wheels like the page 217 car. Think of it as a fast hybrid between Ti Kan’s car and the page 217 car. This is probably closest to my original intent. My only concern is brakes. Pushing 315 hp stock from that engine would mean you’d want some serious stopping power. 15-inch wheels are somewhat limiting in that regard. If you have any suggestions on how to handle something like this, I’m open to them.
OEMplus Plus Notchback Coupe Just how crazy can you go with the OEM theme beyond our first attempt above? Answer: Quite a bit. In Europe, they built 2-door 80 quattros with the notch-back trunk of the 80, not to be confused with the fast back Coupe or Coupe GT that shared their profiles with the ur-Quattro. In North America, some of these two-door sedans were sold as 4000s, though none came with quattro. quattro versions were extremely rare in Europe, but they did exist. This would be more like an oldschool version of VWvortex’s Project X. A two-door conversion would make the car a notchback coupe and a full donor car wouldn’t cost all that much.
Learning recently of the Dialynx Sport quattro conversion parts during our Specialty Car Week, as well as recently spotting long-wheelbase Sport-quattro-look rear fenders in our coverage from the 25th Anniversary of quattro reunion in Ingolstadt, I could easily envision a car that uses the Sport quattro front clip and the widebody rear fenders from the reunion grafted on to the notchback sedan-based coupe. There’d be no other car like it, though I’d suspect the cost would be astronomical. Oldschool RS Most of my models for building this car include the RS 2 engine. Stock, it put out 315 hp from the factory, and was literally breathed on by Porsche. Performance is great, and the amount of attention that Porsche stamped manifold demands when the hood is up is quite impressive. New RS cars are all Audi, but the RS 2 dipped heavily into then-current Porsche styling, using wheels, brakes, front fascia, mirrors and more either from the Porsche parts bin or designed as if they should have come from Stuttgart’s parts bin. This plan would include an exploration of what an RS car might have looked like in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when the B2 Audi 80 a.k.a. 4000 was sold. Period Porsche alloys by Fuchs, Porsche steering wheel, rearview mirrors, door handles, etc. would give the car a unique appearance and be as cool to look at as historical fiction is to read when you’re not reading quattro books you picked up in highschool. Non Authentic OEMplus Departing from the time period of inline 5-cylinder engines and vacuum operated center differentials, I could swap modern parts into this over 20 year old car. The new 2.0-liter FSI-powered 4-cylinder turbo is a very cool engine that would be even more impressive shoehorned into this 2900 lb. 4000 quattro. Other elements like a newer dashboard with its LED backlighting from cars like the TT would be cool touches, and it’s not like we haven’t seen similar conversions at some of the events we’ve traveled to. The purist in me likes this last option the least, but it’d probably prove cheapest to build in the end and the most reliable. As you can see, this project is far from complete. Heck, even the plans for it are far from complete. Either way, we figured launching such a project during the 25th Anniversary of quattro was fitting. A sedan lacks the sexiness of the ur-Quattro, but it offers something you don’t see every day and at a cost well below that of the coupe. 4000s are getting rarer and rarer, and we seldom see small-bumper cars like our ’84 at events any longer. This means parts will be harder to come by, but the results should be that much more satisfying.
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