FRANKFURT MOTOR SHOW: Audi Sport quattro

The final show version of Audi’s Sport quattro has broken cover just days ahead of its debut at next week’s Frankfurt motor show.

The 515kW rocketship is plainly designed to combine the DNA of the original UR Quattro with Audi’s new brand ‘face’ in a mega-fast, plug-in hybrid package.

As we’ve reported , the Sport quattro will combine the RS 7’s twin-turbo 4.0-litre V8 with an electric motor to give other fast hybrids like the BMW i8 something to chew over.

While the Sport quattro was originally meant to have around 430kW from the V8 engine, internal positioning discussions have left it with the same 412kW power output as the RS 7 and the same 700Nm torque peak, too.

Audi supplements this by fitting a disc-shaped electric motor between the V8 and the modified eight-speed automatic transmission. This motor alone is strong enough to deliver 110kW of power and a thumping 400Nm of torque into the system.

The vagaries of combining power and torque curves mean the car has a total vehicle output of 515kW and 800Nm of power, though nearly 600Nm of that is available instantly.

Audi sources say the car can be driven in either a full-electric mode, named EV mode, a Hybrid mode for maximum efficiency or Sport mode for maximum performance.

Left in its Sport mode, the Sport quattro is capable of hitting 100km/h in 3.7 seconds, which is impressive, but hardly the low three-second bracket Audi sources had been leaking just weeks ago, indicating the car’s positioning may have changed internally. A 3.7-second sprint is just 0.2 seconds faster than the RS7 can manage.

Audi’s new motor show hero will top out at a limited 305km/h, which is exactly the same as the (again, limited) top speed of the RS7 with its performance options fitted.

The EV mode can see the Sport quattro eke out up to 50km/h of pure electric driving, which is perfect for inner-city work and most commuting, especially in cities that have restrictions or costs on vehicles with high fuel consumption or engine capacity.

The electric motor draws its energy from a liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery stuffed beneath the rear floor and Audi has given it 14.1kW/h of capacity. It also says that the electric motor’s stupendous (and instant) torque gives it the ability to still be fast off the line in the pure electric mode. Drivers are able to plug the car in to any wall socket or use a fast-charging wallbox that fully recharges the car’s battery pack in under an hour.

The most efficient way to drive the car, Audi says, is in its Hybrid mode. This mode has been used to calculate the car’s combined NEDC fuel-economy figure of 2.5L/100km and its CO2 emissions of 59g/km. The V8 has helped the Sport quattro’s fuel efficiency figures, with the twin-turbo engine boasting cylinder deactivation alongside its pair of vee-mounted twin-scroll turbochargers and direct fuel-injection.

Like BMW’s i8, the Sport quattro uses sophisticated computer algorithms to balance out the power distribution from each motor, but unlike the futuristic BMW, all torque to all four wheels travels through the automatic transmission. This makes the all-wheel drive torque split easier to manage than BMW’s system (which has an electric motor powering the front wheels and a combination of a petrol motor and another small electric motor powering the rear wheels).

Audi has strengthened its Tiptronic eight-speed transmission, combined it with its Torsen quattro all-wheel drive system and uses the wickedly effective Sport differential on the rear axle to help turn torque into effective performance.

More than three decades after the original Quattro, the Sport quattro is heading for a return to the Audi line-up, with a limited production run headed for showrooms from late in 2016 or early in 2017.

Besides borrowing the RS 7’s engine, the Sport quattro also uses a lot of its architecture. It uses the steel-based chassis from the standard RS 7, though it supplements this with aluminium doors and most of its panels, along with carbon-fibre reinforced plastic for the bonnet and the tiny bootlid.

It has cut weight down in other areas as well, especially by using a single carbon-fibre shell as the support structure for the entire cabin layout, including the centre console and the dashboard.

The result is not the ultra-lightweight special some were hoping for, but the 1850kg Sport quattro is still 70kg lighter than the RS7 despite carrying two motors and a full battery pack capable of pure-electric driving and regular recharging on the fly.

Underneath, Audi employed the same five-arm front suspension as the RS 7’s and utilises its five-link, trapezoidal link rear-end as well, then fitted enormous carbon-ceramic brake discs and 285/30 R21 tyres, mounted on centre-locking alloy rims, all-round.

Audi has pulled 130mm out of the RS7’s wheelbase to create the Sport quattro, but it’s a measure of the car’s design focus that its overall length has been slashed by 410mm, or nearly half a metre. It sits on a platform that ends up being 53mm wider than the RS 7’s, at 1964mm, but 33mm lower at 1386mm.

There is no news from Audi about whether it will adhere to its original plan and price the Sport quattro above every other production Audi – even the R8 – though it will still be pieced together on a dedicated production line in Neckarsulm, Germany.

The car has been largely pushed by Audi’s design team and is loosely based on Audi’s 2010 Quattro Concept but is larger, has a longer wheelbase and is more redolent of the original 1980 UR quattro design language.

There has been a reinterpretation of the original car’s blistered wheel-arches as Audi has sought to balance concave and convex panel shapes, but face slaps are all in the front-end. The nose carries an enormous hexagonal single-frame grille that will be the basis of Audi’s future fast-car design language and will dominate all future RS machines.

This is flanked by vertical blades that carry on into creases in the carbon-fibre bonnet, framed at the bottom by a protruding carbon-fibre splitter that sticks out into the airflow.

There are also air intakes on either side of the grille, and that air passes through the engine bay for cooling (for the brakes as well as the motors and transmission) and intercooling for the turbos, and is then extracted via live slots behind the front wheels or specialist vent vanes in the bonnet.

A pair of carbon-fibre sills stretch along the sides to the rear-end, which is a mix of the Audi S2 and the UR Quattro, with a short, chopped-look carbon-fibre diffuser, a spoiler that extends at speed and two oval exhaust outlets.

Another technology introduced on the Sport quattro is Audi’s new lighting system. The Matrix LED system, which combines the lights themselves along with a variety of lenses and reflectors, will be seen in production in the facelifted A8 later this year.

Capable of lighting up and varying the intensity of each individual diode, the Matrix LED works with stereo cameras and Audi’s dazzling array of electronic safety systems. It will light up the road without glaring oncoming traffic and can even warn errant pedestrians of your arrival by flashing them. It also reads the maps in the satellite-navigation system to predict the piece of road it needs to light up before it even gets there.

Inside, the Sport quattro is a full four-seater, even with its battery pack and a crossbeam for extra rigidity, and its rear seats fold down to allow access to its 300-litre boot space.

The driver’s multi-function steering wheel also provides hints into Audi’s fast-car production future and can be used to control its three-dimensional digital instrument cluster.

Besides delivering pleasant nostalgia and giving its design team a chance to stretch its pencils, the Sport 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.

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