Audi Quartz (Pininfarina) (1981)

When the well-known Swiss car magazin “Automobil Revue” celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1980, Sergio Pininfarina, who had a very good relationship to the publishers, decided to make a special birthday present. He thought of a concept car that was a fully functionally and driveable Coupé.

When he wandered the 1980 Geneva Auto Show and saw the newly introduced Audi Quattro he knew that this car should yield the base for his car. Luckily, Audi was quite happy to help and provided a complete (that is not counting the missing body 😉 Quattro in the summer of 1980. During the conversion, Audi always had an eye on the project, but everything worked out fine. Pininfarina built a completely new body ontop of the unchanged quattro base. The body was tested in the windtunnel and had a cD of 0,45. Despite being some 30 cm shorter than the Quattro, the Quartz, as this show car was called, had some room in the rear and even a trunk/boot. Air intake is between the headlights in the body “groove”. The outlet is behind the front fenders, also in the groove. Instead of the headlights of the drawings, small 75mm DE lights were used, a novum for the time.

By using Carbonfiber and sandwich construction, the Quartz was 90kg lighter than the Quattro. The interieur shows modern design and is fully functional, as all the Quattro gauges were taken over, although the dashboard was thoroughly redesigned. A special gag is the exhaust tip! The Quartz was engineered to full drivability and later was purchased by Audi. When in 1986, the “Automobil Revue” went testing the performance, they got a top speed of 217km/h (136mph) and a 0 to 62mph time of 7.1s.

When finally, the Quartz was presented in 1981 at the Geneva Auto Show, all pain was forgotten and a truly unique “Audi” was born.