How an Audi Quattro and some 'smuggled' art got me arrested – Thank Frankel it's Friday

I had many great drives in Quattros, particularly the 20-valve cars that came at the end of the production run and, while they were flawed – no hatchback, weird gear ratios, wind noise, harsh ride and so on – getting behind the wheel was always a special occasion. It was eventually replaced after over a decade in the market by the great looking S2 Coupe so my father, having missed the Quattro boat, rushed out and bought one before realising too late that as a thing to drive, it was actually a massively backward step.

Many of us who were working in the business back then have a Quattro stories and I am no exception. Actually my story came after the car had been off sale for a few years and concerned a very early car which, by the time I drove it, was at least a dozen years old.

It belonged to the father of a senior executive at Haymarket which then, as now, published Autocar where I then worked. The father and Quattro lived in the South of France and when he sadly died, said executive flew down there with the view of driving the car back to the UK. However his trip also coincided with the Geneva Motor Show where he had some business to attend to, so he decided to pop in on his way back.

While in Geneva he was either unavoidably delayed or the novelty of driving the Audi over long distances had worn off, so he asked me if I’d mind taking it back instead. Mind? I’d be delighted. So, grabbing a junior member of my road test team, before dawn on the morning after press day we lobbed our things in the boot of the Quattro and headed for home.

We didn’t get very far. The Switzerland-France border in fact, where we were surprised to find a stern looking guard barring our route. Where were our papers? I offered our passports. He was unimpressed. Where were the papers for the car, specifically where was the carnet allowing it to be temporarily imported into Switzerland? And what, exactly, was that on the back seat? It was still dark, the car’s interior was dark and neither of us had even looked at the back seat. When I did, I saw a large rug. ‘A rug?’ I ventured hopefully. And what, exactly, was under the rug? It was only when I lifted a corner and saw what looked like some rather fine art that I realised we might be in for a long day.

They took our passports and instructed us to follow them to a police station. They didn’t believe our story for a moment so sat us in a room and said we’d stay there until they were satisfied we’d nicked neither the car nor the paintings on its back seat. How we did that was a matter for us. Back then I didn’t even have a mobile but was allowed to make a telephone call; but minion that I was, I didn’t have the big cheese’s telephone number. Still at 9.00am UK time I was able to ring his secretary and blurt out details of the calamity that had befallen us. She said she’d sort it out.

For the next nine hours we sat there, long enough I recall for a little blizzard to turn everything white, and then for it all to thaw.

Eventually however we were told arrangements had been made and that we were free to leave. But they impounded the paintings and, would you believe, even the rug in which they’d been wrapped for safe transport because they thought we might have been smuggling that, too.

To say I was displeased by the way things had turned out was putting it rather mildly, and I’m afraid I took it out on the only inanimate object to hand: my boss’s boss’s boss’s dad’s Quattro, which soon became very animate indeed.

We drove that car at whatever speed we could make it do all the way to the coast. For over a decade it had lived a very quiet life with an elderly owner and done hardly any miles at all. And now we parked its engine on the limiter (or whatever it would pull) in top gear and left it there for hours. I wanted to get home and if it blew, it blew.

It never so much as coughed. We absolutely thrashed the poor thing and it wore it likeit was a trip to the shops. My affection and admiration for the Quattro was renewed all over again.

The following morning and after not nearly enough sleep I drove it into the office and dropped off the keys with the secretary. On my desk was a short note of apology attached to a bottle of whisky, which was a nice gesture. Yes, it had a been a long day, but it all worked out in the end, I’d had an epic drive and have dined out on the story ever since. And I still don’t know if he ever got his art back.