The S1 and the Ur Stig

“No!” It was a surprisingly emphatic answer to a very simple question. Hugely reflexive in its rapidity, like the German default answer you get to a difficult bureaucratic request.

The thing was, this seemed like a fairly obvious thing to do. I could understand if they didn’t want me to drive the new Audi S1 around a wet (but not icy), small track at an airport in Sweden’s middle. But I didn’t want to drive it. I’d already driven it.

I wanted Stig Blomqvist to drive it, with me in the passenger seat. Not just Stig Blomqvist, but The Stig Blomqvist. The Ur Stig.

Blomqvist won the World Rally Championship for Audi in 1984, and by then his professional rally career stretched back to 1968. In his eager youth, he was a dominant driver for Saab, winning the Swedish rally, the 1000 Lakes in Finland and the RAC in Great Britain as far back as 1971, in what you’d now consider a breakthrough season. It sure helped Saab, that most unlikely of rally contenders, which rode Blomqvist’s wave to finish second in what then passed as a manufacturers championship when Nixon was the US President.

Back when rally cars were far more closely aligned to their road-going namesakes, Blomqvist won his first WRC event in Sweden in 1973 in, naturally, a Saab 96 V4. He was a loyal Swede into the 99 Turbo era until the Swedish carmaker saw the writing on the rally wall and withdrew from competition in 1981, just when Group B began to get interesting.

He had a relatively thumb-twiddling 1981 season with Talbot Sunbeam Lotus, unable to stop Ari Vatanen winning his only world title, before joining Audi as an irregular driver in its first serious WRC campaign in 1982.

Audi, it seemed, had to find somebody guaranteed to win the Swedish rally (which Blomqvist duly did) while it propelled Michele Mouton in a futile effort to overcome Walter Rohrl’s Opel to become the first female world champion.

Audi was happy enough with his efforts to sign him as its full-time third driver in 1983, just in time to help long-time rival Hannu Mikkola to the world title (Stig himself had to be satisfied with the British title).

Just as Mikkola’s championship was a fitting reward for a 20-year career as perhaps the dominant forest rally driver of all time, so Blomqvist’s 1984 WRC title capped his own glittering career. He split his season between two quattro models (the A2 quattro and the Sport quattro) and won five rallies despite the attentions of Mikkola, Mouton and new teammate Rohrl, plus the Lancia 037 Rallye and, late in the year, the arrival of Ari Vatanen in the Peugeot 205 T16.

Mikkola finished with eight podiums in 1984, but it wasn’t enough to topple Stig’s wins in Sweden (of course!), Greece, New Zealand, Argentina and the Ivory Coast -- along with second on the Monte Carlo rally.

When the craziness of Group B crowds forced Audi to pull out in 1985, Blomqvist continued in the WRC with Ford, Peugeot and Nissan, but he never won again.

His ties with Audi remain close, with his local Swedish dealership providing him with a car (an A4 Avant quattro at the moment, glad you asked) and it’s Audi head office that brought him here to Are in Sweden to help with the launch of its new hot hatch.

Although Stig’s here to chat to people and to take them on rides in an original, fully operational S1 quattro World Rally Championship car. What he’s not allowed to do, evidently, is to take me for a drive in the new S1 Sportback.

From the reaction I got, you’d have thought I was asking on behalf of some elk-tracking hut-dweller who’d just walked in off a dog sled. But I was asking on behalf of a man who had won the world championship for this very company and was here at its express invitation…

A man in his home country, where he won the national rally an astonishing seven times!

A man who, on a far tougher piece of road on the same day, was entrusted with a rare World Championship quattro S1 with far more power, far less grip and worth far more money!

A man who’d just shown me he skill levels he retains at 70 years old by bouncing the rally quattro off snow banks, holding long, languid drifts, patiently waiting for the monster turbo to spool up and delivering that delicious five-cylinder bellow with every application of whatever the Swedish translation of “jandal” might be!

Figuring the rejection of the entire concept was rooted in the German love for Plan A (and, when in doubt, the application of even more Plan A), we canvassed a wider and wider circle of Audi folk until we found a chink in the armour. One simple “maybe”.

While we used this for leverage, Stig and yours truly chatted history and the future. His favourite rally, oddly enough, was the Swedish one. It had been good to him, he insisted. But he hated Corsica.

“The stages are too long and it’s too dangerous. It costs too much if small things go wrong,” he said in his slightly squeaky voice.

And he knows. He was there when Attilio Bettega was killed driving a Lancia 037 Rallye in 1983, then again when Henri Toivonen and Sergio Cresta died driving a Delta for the same team two years later.

“It’s not right, what happened to Henri. Nobody ever was able to tell me why that car caught fire and was gone so fast.

“It was too fast, that fire. A car doesn’t burn to the ground like that. Even now, nobody has explained it to me.”

Fortunately for Blomqvist, the quattro had a far better safety record than its rivals, even if the reasons for that safety record hampered its speed against the later Group B prototypes.

“Well, our car was always based on the road car and the others were not. I don’t know what they made the Delta out of but it was not made of what they made the quattro with.

“Our big problem was never power or grip. It was the weight distribution.

“People, they think the last evolutions had much more power, but it wasn’t true. They were really made for weight distribution, to put more on the back.”

Still, those last Evolution models made for some of the best YouTube footage, with steam hissing out of the water-cooled brakes, the softly sprung bodies squatting under power and that operatic bellow threatening to steal the show.

But it all got too much in 1986, with the death of three spectators (and injuries to many more) in Portugal. Blomqvist was driving a Ford RS200, the same sort of car a local driver crashed causing the fatalities.

“It was crazy there, but that’s the mentality of the people. It was similar in Italy. They just want to join you.

“But sometimes you could not drive flat out. The Sintra stage was really bad.

“You could not see the road past 50 metres and you could not use any of the apexes in the notes because there were hundreds of people on them.

“Sintra, well, we were just happy to finish the stage without a problem.”

When we finally get the all clear of the Audi crowd for a couple of laps of the tiny track in the new S1, we’ve covered his theories behind Mouton’s sudden fall from form in 1984, Rohrl’s relatively ineffectiveness (but huge kudos) in the quattro and his son’s avoidance of his hobbit-like footsteps by taking a circuit racing career.

At Stig’s first glance around the S1 Sportback’s cabin, something occurs to me. He hasn’t driven the car before, which he quickly confirms with a “Help me to turn things off.”

And, just like that, he’s got the little hatch rolling and into third gear without a single identifiable driveline wobble. And then he mashes the throttle to pull down all 170kW from the 2.0-litre four-cylinder.

“It has a strong mid-range, doesn’t it?” he states, with his hands held unusually high on the steering wheel. I ask him why.

“It’s a Saab thing,” he laughs.

“You had to give them a hard turn to bring the back around and I needed more steering.

“It wasn’t like today with pace notes. My first years were all blind rallies. I didn’t know which way I’d have to make a hard turn. I just knew I’d have to make a hard turn.”

Blomqvist’s a busy driver at the wheel, with those high hands jiggling a lot in short, sharp jabs and the brake and accelerator both working overtime. But the car just flows from one apex to the next in a seamless surge. Mostly.

There’s one tightening corner where he arrives demonstrably too fast, turns in and gives the throttle a big lift-off at high revs. And nothing happens except understeer.

“They still do that!” he laughs.

“You still can’t get the back around with the throttle. You never could!”

On the next lap he shows me what he wanted to do by reefing the wheel and dabbing the brake instead.

“Ah, that’s better,” he said as the long drift began and the apex slid by beneath the inside front tyre.

“You know, this car is very good. The powertrain is great. Gets its power on the road really well.

“I wonder if they will do a club sport version. I think they should.

“They should strip it out and sell it with a roll cage. It would be a very nice entry-level rally car as it is.”

With that he stopped, stepped out, walked away and paused for an admiring glance back at the little S1 that, in name at least, succeeded Audi’s most famous rally car.

“Yes, that would make a terrific little club rally car. You should tell one of the big people...”

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