Audi A1 quattro 2012 Review

It’s pretty clear who won on the naming front because “S1” is gone, with the rationale being that it’s not a full-run production model. Instead, Audi will build just 333 A1 quattros and most of them have already been sold. And they’re all left-hand drive.

The other major change has been the engine. The little one has gone, replaced by the award-winning 2.0-litre TFSI turbo motor and pumping out 188kW of power.

Some things are the same, though. It still spins through a six-speed manual gearbox and it still twists four drive shafts in its pursuit of grip.

And, when it starts trickling into dealerships in July this year, none of them will trickle their way here.

And you can only have it in what Audi calls Arctic White. The aficionados might spot it in traffic, with its red strips in the headlights, its 100mm twin tailpipes and its little rear spoiler sitting proud of the roofline.

There are leather seats inside, along with integrated headrests and a quattro logo on the seat back. The driver’s toys include stainless steel-covered pedals, an aluminium gear knob (just the thing in a Swedish winter…) and a flat-bottomed, leather steering wheel.

They’ve also been sifting through the parts bins of their larger cars to find upmarket bits like Xenon lights (which turn as you corner and automatically flip back and forwards between high and low beam), MMI plus infotainment and a 14-speaker Bose sound system.

It’s got Bluetooth, naturally, and Audi’s in-car system that can take one SIM card and turn the whole car into a rolling WLAN hotspot.

There are larger tyres, too, with 8.0J x 18-inch cast alloys playing host to 225/35 R18 tyres, though we couldn’t confirm the Michelin brand on the spec list because ours had an odd-sounding Scandinavian tyre bursting with bits of metal.

Audi figured it was costing a lot of money to reengineer the A1 to fit all-wheel drive, so it might as well reward buyers with a more powerful mill. And rear end. And gearbox. And so the TTS became the donor model for most of the oily bits.

The difficulty has always been that the A1 was developed off the Volkswagen Polo architecture, and nobody ever imagined the Polo would need all-wheel drive. Essentially, they’ve had to reengineer the back end to take a narrower version of the TTS back end, plus find a way to fit a rear prop shaft, plus find somewhere to fit an extra output shaft from the gearbox.

But the big engine is the star, regardless of what feats of re-engineering occurred beneath the floor. It combines direct fuel injection with turbocharging to deliver 350Nm of torque between 2500 and 4500rpm, while its power peak arrives at 6000 revs and it keeps spinning for another 500 revs.

Given that the A1 quattro is the lightest thing it will ever sit inside, you’d expect the 2.0-litre four to deliver economy, but it fails, really. Audi claims 8.5L/100km on the combined cycle, which is only 1.4 litres better than BMW’s twin-turbo M5 V8 posts…

But don’t blame the engine for the (lack of) fuel economy. Blame the gearing. It compensates for its thirst (and tiny 45 litre fuel tank) by hitting 100km/h in 5.7 seconds and sprinting hard for its 245km/h top speed.

The all-wheel drive system isn’t a classical quattro drive system, because it’s front-wheel drive most of the time and only brings the rear diff into play when the front wheels begin to slip. It’s the type of system that has been seen in everything from the Honda CR-V to the Golf R, with a clutch pack left in charge of sending the drive aft.

Its job is helped by the A1 quattro running a pair of limited slip differentials and using torque vectoring, and Audi has positioned the clutch pack at the back end to help with the car’s weight distribution.

On paper, the A1 quattro’s torsion beam rear suspension system reads a bit low rent, but it works effectively. On ice, anyway.

That wasn’t the end of the challenges, though. The rear diff could only go where the A1’s spare wheel traditionally sat, so it was tossed for a unique tank that ends up carrying the same capacity as the original. Similarly, the tail shaft had to go where the fuel tank was, so it, too, disappeared.

It also borrows electric power steering and has had all of its suspension components retuned and stiffened, even though it carries the standard A1 ride height.

In all, the A1 quattro carries 600 unique parts compared to the standard three-door and the whole exercise took 17 months. And, as befits an in-house job, it’s built by Audi AG, not the hot shop merchants over at Quattro GmbH.

The work beneath the decks means the quattro still manages the same 210-litre luggage capacity as its front-driven sibling, though you can fold them flat to gain an extra 650 litres.

The rear seats are very usable and they’re even comfortable, even if nobody likes to scissor fold to get into them and there is simply no elegant way for skirt-clad women to get out of them again.

It’s 3987mm long, 1740mm wide and 1416 high. Oddly, its track is actually a touch narrower than the standard model, largely because of the different wheel offsets Audi had to use to make the new rear end fit.

The Golf R is cheaper with the same all-wheel drive system (and engine, though at a different state of tune), but bigger.

Subaru still builds WRXs, so on the basis of being all-wheel drive and turbo-charged, it’s got to be a contender as well. Even though it’s ugly.

Our drive was limited to testing on a frozen lake and an equally frozen airstrip and never stretched fast enough to confirm whether Audi had fitted more than a three-speed gearbox.

But what we did find was a very safe, quick, cheerful bundle of fun. At this price, it would want to be, but that’s what it is.

With the skid control systems in place, the A1 quattro made short, efficient work of the test track’s series of second and third gear corners, but it was with the systems all switched off that the machine began to bring smiles.

The engine felt smooth and swift here, spinning up easily to its 6500rpm limiter even though it didn’t carry the same aural menace it’s been convinced to exude in its other iterations. In fact, it’s almost too quiet for a car of this nature.

It’s effective, though, and one of the reasons it’s been so successful is its near-complete lack of unwanted vibration and harshness. It’s brilliantly smooth, probably the best engine of its generation in this class.

It’s 1390kg – which isn’t a tiddler, even allowing for the extra scaffolding it carries. It may hamper the agility on the road (we just don’t know), which may also explain why the only two times we’ve driven the quattro, we’ve driven it on ice.

It’s still convincing in a straight line, even on ice, with all four wheels spinning up at will, even in third gear, and the engine providing enough torque to make the mid-range revs the place to be for maximum speed and drive.

But the key to it is the ability of the chassis to extract smiles from its drivers. It’s the only A1 that can be tossed almost backwards into a corner and still come out facing the right way.

It can hold long, long slides, but they’re not languid. They tend to be a combination of managed four-wheel drifts that start neutral, tend towards understeer towards the apex and can be coaxed into wicked tail-happy slides on the way out. But they take some furious wheel work by the driver to manage, because understeer isn’t far away if the entire situation isn’t kept on a tight rein at all times.

So it’s a lot of fun, but is it worth the cost? Well, while we admire Audi for building cars like this and continuing to be adventurous, part of us is also happy that they don’t have to try to sell this in Australia for the $100,000 cost it would probably need.