FRANKFURT MOTOR SHOW: Audi Quattro Sport

Thirty years after the original, Audi is returning the Quattro badge to its line-up.

These sketches are confirmation that Audi will debut its new Quattro Sport at next month’s Frankfurt motor show, with a limited production run heading into showrooms from late 2016.

Based around the current RS 7 architecture, the Quattro Sport will be priced well above every other production Audi – even the R8 - and put together on a dedicated production line in Neckarsulm, Germany.

Driven largely by Audi’s design team, the Quattro Sport will be based loosely on Audi’s 2010 Quattro Concept (pictured here in white), but is larger, has a longer wheelbase and utilises more of the design language from the original 1980 UR quattro.

Besides delivering pleasant nostalgia and giving its design team a chance to take its pencils for a walk, the Quattro is designed to be a high-profile counter to attacks on Audi’s all-wheel drive positioning by everybody from BMW and Mercedes-Benz to Subaru and Jaguar.

While purists would love for the Quattro Sport to use a five-cylinder engine, with its uniquely deep sound tuning, that won’t be fast enough or expensive enough for the positioning Audi has in mind.

To justify the dollars and to put Audi’s eco-credential flag firmly into the ground, sources suggest its version of Quattro GmbH’s twin-turbo 4.0-litre V8 will offer around 30kW more than even the mighty RS 7 can boast. That will take it out to around the 440kW mark and around 600Nm of torque, but that’s only from the V8.

Like BMW’s i8, the Quattro Sport sends a strong signal that Audi’s fast-car future lies in plug-in hybrids. Sources say the V8 will also be mated to a 110kW electric motor to deliver 0-100km/h sprints in the low three-second bracket and it will have a top speed limited of more than 300km/h.

Sources have suggested the hybrid powertrain, with a disc-shaped electric motor wedged between the V8 and the eight-speed automatic transmission, will deliver total system power of more than 520kW and could boast as much as 1100Nm of torque.

The Quattro Sport will be the fastest of all Audis, yet will also be able to eke out around 50km of pure electric driving range, which is about 50 per cent further than BMW’s i8 plug-in hybrid is capable of.

Even though it’s expensive, it will still sit on a shorter version of the A6/A7’s MLB platform. Its wheelbase will be somewhere between the Quattro Concept’s and the A6’s, so expect something around 2700mm, which significantly alters the visual proportions from the original concept car’s shorter 2600mm wheelbase.

Where the original concept was 4280mm long, the production car will be closer to 4400mm, which will still be around shorter than the A5 thanks to tiny overhangs.

It will use a proper Torsen mechanical all-wheel drive system combined with Audi’s brilliant sport differential and torque vectoring to all four wheels.

The Quattro Sport will be significantly lighter, too, with suggestions that a heavy emphasis on carbon-fibre could pull its kerb weight down to just over 1400kg, making it slightly heavier than the concept car but at least 500kg lighter than the RS 7 with the same chassis.

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