Pass Blasters: Over the Alps with Quattro

In a land where mountains are few and far between, most Australian car lovers dream of tackling Europe’s famous Alpine passes.

Most would be happy with just one Alpine pass, preferably behind the wheel of something fast, secure and powerful, just to make the memories last longer. A happy coincidence for us, then, that Audi’s Quattro GmbH is getting a bit concerned about Mercedes-Benz trying to pinch its all-wheel drive crown. And to reinforce its message, Audi’s performance offshoot decided it needed a road trip across not just one Alpine mountain pass, but 44 of them!

Audi’s plan was to start in the Austrian ski city of Klagenfurt, run along the Austrian Alps, then Bavaria, back to Austria, a little dip into Italy, across to Switzerland, then run across the Swiss Alps until they turned into the French Alps, then to keep dancing along Europe’s rooftop until it hit Monaco, before turning around and doing it all again on the way home.

Forty four mountain passes over 4440km, very few of which are at anything less than 1000 metres…

Then, in case any of that sounded dull, Audi decided to bring along a fleet of RS 5 Cabriolets, RS 6 Avants and RS 7 thunderbuses to drive and, for good measure, threw in the launch of the RS Q3 as well. You can read about that one separately, but it’s basically the result of stuffing a lot of brakes and suspension hardware in alongside the TT RS’s five-cylinder turbo motor in the baby Q3 bodyshell.

Oh, and if that wasn’t already interesting enough, Audi lined up a pair of 1980 UR quattros and a pair of 1984 Sport quattros (or, the “Short” quattro, as everybody called it), just on the off chance anybody would be interested in a steer.

But a garage brimming with RS models pushes away visions of lonely goatherds, and we claim the RS Q3 for the run back into Bavaria over the Fern Pass, then into Italy over the Brenner and Jaufer Passes into the spa town of Merano, in Italy’s Sud Tirol region.

The Fern Pass was a much busier place once, but there is still traffic enough because it’s the main link between western Germany and the Tyrol region. It’s only 1212 metres high, but it’s as beautiful as anything you’d expect between Austria and the Bavarian Alps. The trouble is that it’s not terribly wide and because it’s so low it never rises above the tree line and the the view mostly compromises tree trunks and leaves.

The upside is that it delivers us to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a Bavarian town famed for its winter sport. It holds men’s and women’s world cup events for downhill, slalom, Super G, biathlon, cross-country and even ski jumping (it’s part of the famous Four Hills tournament) and in summer it’s a mountain-biking and hiking paradise.

And it carries the best of Bavaria’s Oktoberfest bier, which we cleverly used to replace the Interalpen’s only failing (its awful Zepter beer).

But if the route around the Fern Pass isn’t especially high, it does let us slip down a private road (five euros – and Germany has plenty of these sorts of roads) skirting the shores of lakes, farms and mountains that seem to loom larger the longer you look at them.

We pop back into Austria’s Achensee for lunch, and it’s a gorgeous spot, 9.4km long with roads close enough to the shoreline, 10 metre visibility, historic yachts and fabulous lake fish in most restaurants.

So far, though, we’ve been sent on one big loop. That changes as we skirt around Innsbruck (another winter sport haven, which has hosted the Winter Olympics), and blast south for the Brenner Pass.

Even though the Brenner isn’t one of the highest passes in Europe, it’s certainly one of the busiest and most important. Its use began during the Roman Empire and it’s been fought over by everyone from Napoleon Bonaparte (and the local rebel Hofer) to Austrian emperors. Hitler and Mussolini even met at the top once, in the little village of Brennero (which is how Mussolini would have said it. Hitler would have said “Brenner”), while it was a key part of the hiking trail used by Adolf Eichmann and other Nazi war criminals to escape the Allies after WWII.

Today, the old road, opened in the year Captain Cook discovered Australia, is overshadowed by a monster highway with fabulous mountain valley views and nearly two million trucks a year. But where the new road leaves you on cruise control, the old road ducks and dives and meanders into villages and sequences hairpins and gentle bends around gentle streams and hillsides.

And it still climbs at up to 12 per cent (so you don’t see too many cyclists), but only to the Brenner Pass’s 1370 metres and then it pops into Italy so suddenly that you only really notice when the phone’s service provider changes and cigarette butts and plastic bottles begin to litter the roadside.

From there, we stay on Italy’s rooftop, rarely dipping below 1000 metres, until we rip the RS Q3 skywards again. These roads aren’t just switchbacks, but broad, well-paved sinuous pieces of entrapment that swing through the trees, offer generous overtaking moves and, finally, burst out above the treeline. Welcome to the Jaufenpass (or, much more romantically in Italian, the Passo di Monte Giovo).

At 2094 metres, it’s only 130 or so metres lower than Mount Kosciuszko and it’s one of Italy’s forgotten postcards. It connects the spa town of Merano to the dairy town of Sterzing (both Italian, regardless of their names, though the locals prefer to speak German and wish they were Austrian) and you’ll need to climb at 12 per
cent to reach the top.

More eye-popping photos from the Audi Alpine Tour 2013

The whole place looks like a racetrack laid out on a private mountaintop and it encourages that sort of thinking, too. It’s through here that we finally figure out just how chuckable the RS Q3 really is and how strong its five-pot motor makes it as an attacking weapon.

We stopped for photography here, but the wind is so strong and the weather so changeable that four different runs look like they were shot on four different days. Bring your entire wardrobe…

Brilliantly (and unusually, given that most Alpine pass starting points are above 1000 metres), the road then plummets 1774 metres down into Merano.

It’s only 37km long, and that’s if you measure it from where it starts to climb to where it flattens out again at the bottom, so it’s a pretty savage beast of a mountain, though there is a fabulous little bar at the top offering some pretty high-calorie cakes to replenish all that energy lost in cycling or hiking. Or sitting still twirling a wheel…

If the ride up was a hoot, the ride down is a furious exercise in swooping past the unsuspecting, in slotting into hairpins and punching out of villages clinging stubbornly to mountain cliffs. It’s a torture test for brakes, made no easier by a bit of extravagant driving in a fit of stroppiness, but the RS Q3 seems nonchalant enough about it, which means you won’t have to worry on any sort of descent Australia can throw at it.

It’s one impossibly romantic Italian farming village after another on the way down until, finally, it flattens out and dorkily narrow little apple tractors, all of which look as though they’d fall over with a minimal push, become mobile chicanes in harvest season.

Audi decides we should overnight in Merano and, given the chance, it’s not a bad idea. It’s one of the ancient spa towns on the route, blessed with spring water, a wonderfully clean river, a pretty centro and the Forst brewery, designed to slot right in to the natural environment.

Lifting its Kevlar bonnet is a one-finger exercise, so desperate was rally boss Roland Gumpert to match the Peugeot 205 T16, and the 2.1-litre, five-cylinder engine is unadorned with niceties like a modern engine cover.

It’s old enough that its compliance plate is stamped “Audi NSU Auto Union AG” and the entire engine bay is dominated by its enormous turbocharger (sitting a ludicrous distance from the block by today’s standards) and all of its plumbing.

Two things become immediately clear. The Sport quattro isn’t the source of the modern five-cylinder RS motor’s engine note and that the car is actually pretty comfortable. Little bumps are punched up into the cabin and the thing pitches and squats like an over-enthusiastic boy scout at a jamboree, but it handles the big stuff surprisingly well.

Dodging in an out of more apple tractors, it responds to a full throttle attack with, umm, not much. The core of the five-cylinder is very smooth and surprisingly vibration free, but that big turbo won’t bother anybody until the tacho meanders towards 3500rpm. But then it will bother everybody.

Officially only a 228kW and 350Nm proposition, the Shorty bats harder than that thanks, in part, to a 1300kg kerb weight, but it’s dominated by its turbocharger.

Forget the sweet-spinning, deeply baritone angry engine note of the rally cars. The Shorty road car was nothing like that. You can barely hear an engine beneath it all, but the overwhelming noise is the WOOOOOSSSSHHHHH of that KKK-K26 oil-cooled turbocharger on full boost, the THRRRRREWWWW of the wastegates off boost and the howl of 15-inch rubber trying to keep up with it all.

Even so, in the climb out of Italy into Switzerland’s Ofen Pass, there’s not much that threatens to trouble the chassis.

There is a mountain of grip here and the free breathing that Audi gave the Shorty by making it the first Audi with a four-valve head helps it blister skywards and turns tiny overtaking windows into luxuriant giggles. But only if you start accelerating the turbo about three seconds before you need it.

Called the Passo del Forno in Italian, the 2149m pass is open all year round and is named after the ancient iron furnaces that still dot the landscape, even if it’s now all a National Park. Climbing up alongside the Munster and Ortler valleys, the stone-age pass is now beautifully made and covered by hiking tracks. And, on this day, wastegate chatter.

And then it’s across the top and into the heavily-policed delights of Switzerland…

The bottom end of this pass heads downhill into the ski town of St Moritz. motoring.com.au then took great delight in taunting German and American colleagues with tales of derring-do and wild car chases by our own George Lazenby as 007. Then failed miserably to replicate it all.

The roads here quickly scamper beyond the trees, with the scenery ranging from mountain heather to barren, broken rocks, with flitting clouds giving everything a different colour every minute. And it’s not a series of hairpins – the most over-rated of corner type of corner in the world – but a flowing, sweeping ribbon that feels like it’s been dropped down by whoever designed Phillip Island.

And it doesn’t seem to matter how high it climbs or what its demands are, the biturbo V8 responds so instantly that, after the Shorty, it’s almost frightening.

Long straights seem disturbingly short, short straights seem like small windows to find a turn-in point and it explodes out of anything crooked in a way that would have frightened Formula One cars in the Cosworth era.

And it needs to be good, because the ancient, Roman-era Julier Pass, once the most important in Europe, climbs to 2284 metres. On one side is the catchment area for the Rhine River, on the other side the catchment for the Danube.

The road is beautifully built and maintained in magnificent condition, with a series of stepped small plateaus climbing nearly 1500 metres up the northern side while the equally spectacular south side plummets 500 metres in no time at all.

In the falling afternoon light, the Oberalp Pass proves to be almost the most spectacular of them all. Climbing to 2046 metres, it’s a series of charges forward, then involuntary stops for photos, then charges forward again.

It’s filled with dairy farms and, higher, national parks. In the silence between bellowing V8s, the air fills with the clanging of cowbells, which are not just tourist crap here.

It is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful pieces of road I’ve ever driven, with the sun glinting through the clouds to reveal the Vorderrhein Valley more than a kilometre below. And if it’s all too much, you can always take the train up or down the western side.

But on this trip, the “down” part doesn’t stay down for long and begins to rise again within minutes as we hit the early stages of the 2224-metre Susten Pass. The medieval mule track was upgraded during WWII (just in case, mind you…) and is the youngest of all the roads on Switzerland’s passes.

We climbed up the valley in warm, cloudy sunlight, and then crossed beneath the summit’s tunnel to a white out of fog so dense we couldn’t see the end of the bonnet. So we waited. Then we worked out it wasn’t fog, but cloud, then we worked out that it came and went as the wind blew.

And if the Oberalp Pass is one of the most beautiful, then drivers will know the Susten to be even better. It is littered with tunnels carved into tumbling mountain ridges that fall into nothingness. It has dozens of easy car parks to stop and soak up the views and it’s just one of the world’s special places.

It’s a soft, straight-ish run from there to our overnight halt at Interlaken, the small Swiss tourist trap lurking between the Thun and Brienzer lakes. As quaint as it is, it is a let down after the majesty of the day we’ve just had.

The simplest takeaway is this… If you ever get a chance to drive here, rather than fly or train, then drive. And take an extra day. You will remember it for the rest of your life.

We will…

More eye-popping photos from the Audi Alpine Tour 2013

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