Stig Blomqvist drive

The Real Stig can only be the man whose ludicrous commitment in front-drive, 1970s Saabs lead him to greater things, regardless of what the BBC says.

A man whose left-foot braking skills on ice translated with such fluidity to all surfaces in the nose-heavy Audi Quattro that he won the World Championship in his first season in the beast.

Stig Blomqvist is almost as he always was. Never an athlete of the Chris Atkinson mould, Blomqvist is these days clearly far happier over a plate of moose-heart sausage than a treadmill. But he trended to portly even in his pomp.

There is much unchanged about Blomqvist, even if there is more of him. The pate is still gleaming through a corona of a head of hair and the walk is still more of a shuffle than anything else. He looks like a man who found his senior citizen’s gait in his youth and kept at it, waiting for the day it would fit his birthdate.

He remains an incredibly unromantic Swede whose natural lack of curiosity probably helped him to live through the blood-dripping excesses of rallying’s Group B era with his emotions only lightly scathed.

We took a ride alongside Blomqvist in a Sport Quattro WRC car, plucked straight from Audi’s museum, in northern Sweden recently. There was a frozen lake to play on, but Blomqvist preferred the forest stage between the snow banks and the pine trees, complete with wobbles, jumps, blind crests and ever-present threats to life and limb.

Not the least risk to life and limb came from the Audi itself, though Blomqvist did admit that he was glad he drove one of the production-based, all-metal machines in the height of rallying’s madness rather than one of the lightweight specials put out by Lancia and Peugeot.

Not that he ever fell in love with his Audi, other than the engine.

“That engine; nothing before it or after it sounded like that engine,” he remembered. “I drove a lot of cars, but that five-cylinder…”

But Blomqvist couldn’t shed light on the car wheeled out for his amusement up here.

“I don’t know what it is or whose it was. It’s a Sport Quattro, and it’s from my time at Audi, so I might have driven it. Might have won in it. No idea. Doesn’t really matter, does it?”

It’s not quite up to works-spec, circa 1984, but it’s close. Blomqvist admits the turbo has been turned down a few psi to keep it alive for longer (“Boost just gets in the way on snow”), but otherwise it’s stock.

The short Swede’s shuffling gait is no different inside the Quattro, either. His feet are constantly shuffling and dancing. And that’s just when he has the thing idling on the frozen airstrip.

It’s disappointing initially. The idle is a bit quiet and even when he drives off, there’s little by way of urgency and the sound even lacks the potential for potency.

…But he’s been taking it easy on the backroads to his stage. He passes the road control officials, then unleashes hell.

The Sport hurls you back in the seat – partly through speed and partly through squat – as he punches the throttle. It’s a bit tardy up until 4000 revs, but then the famous noise becomes an all-saturating bellow that combines richness with smoothness and menace with brutality all at the same time.

No part of your body is allowed to flinch from the assault, nothing is spared. It fizzes through any body part that might touch the car, from the seat to the footwell. It brutalizes your neck and your collarbones where they meet the belts.

And, though he’s taking it easy, Blomqvist has the stubby Audi dancing. His feet shuffle back and forth between the pedals as he sometimes brakes with his right foot and sometimes with his left. The gearshifts snap through like creamy bolts through their H-patterns.

And the grip is, well… 1984 was a long time ago and damper, spring and diff technology has come a long way. The grip is nothing like what a Group N Lancer might offer.

The biggest problem the Quattro had was that its engine hung out in front of the front axle line and that is never more obvious than in the Sport on snow and ice. It doesn’t matter what Blomqvist does to it, because it just wants to fall into understeer every time he gets back onto the throttle. And, if he doesn’t back it into the corner j-u-s-t so, it wants to push wide with no throttle on at all.

That’s why left-foot brakers had a field day in the car, and Blomqvist freely admits his Saab days meant he had an easier transition to this car than rear-drive guys like Hannu Mikkola.

And Blomqvist knew his Saabs, having won international rallies for the Swedish brand as early as 1971 before joining them for the WRC in 1973.

But to make that Saab-derived technique effective, Audi had to make the springs soft all round, so the car would react every time he brushed the brake pedal to make the tail swing about again to dissuade the nose from pushing. While that was happening, the right foot was blipping away at the throttle to keep the turbo on boost and to keep the car flailing away sideways.

Yet the result is a heavy rocking back and forward on the springs throughout any given corner.

“Timo (Salonen, the 1985 World Rally Champion) joked that the Sport looked so bad the way it rocked back and forward that it needed an anti-roll bar between the front and the rear. It was worse on high-grip roads, like tarmac, but he was probably right.

“I much preferred the long-wheelbase cars. They were a lot nicer and more progressive.”

It’s a different story in faster corners, where the Quattro feels demonstrably more stable and composed and able to use all of its stupendous performance to punch through in long, relatively languid drifts.

And you can see, looking back on the youtube videos, how it could leap across the tops of the Finnish hills seeming like it j-u-s-t touched each crest on the way over.

And he drives it like a man who won 11 WRC rallies, took 33 podiums and won 486 WRC stages in a career reaching into five separate decades. It is he, not the car, who is in control.

But one corner coming home was telling. Blomqvist brakes early into a tight left hander and the nose washes wide. He stabs at the brake with his left foot, but it continues to wash wide. He tries a bit of throttle to get him into a position to give it a Scandinavian flick, but it’s having none of it.

And when he gets to the corner, it’s miles from the apex, the turbo is off boost and the getaway is fearfully slow.

“That was always the risk with it. Miss by an inch and it missed by a mile.”

But this car and Blomqvist are forever woven together into the same story, whether he loved it or not. He won five rallies in his championship year and never won again at the top level, even though he finished second in the ‘85 season as the special rockets from Ford, Peugeot and Lancia increasingly held sway.

The WRC had spiraled into dangerous country, though, and Audi withdrew, leaving Blomqvist to solider on as a gun for hire for everybody from Peugeots to Ford and from Nissan and VW to Skoda.

He has never officially retired.