Find Another One: Hannu Mikkola's ex‑Works Audi Quattro

As competition car histories go, this one isn’t too shabby: Let’s kick off with its part in Hannu Mikkola’s World Driver’s Championship in 1983 and follow it with its retention by Audi as a training and R&D car before being converted to Group B specification in which guise it won the Finnish Rally Championship and the Arctic Rally in 1984 and 1985. It also went on to win the Arctic Rally for a third consecutive year in 1986. Not bad. Not bad at all …

After this it spent three years pounding Finnish rallycross courses before being acquired by a notable Swedish collector in 1991. So that’ll be six years of extreme punishment then, not that the car wouldn’t have taken this all in its stride.

After this it spent three years pounding Finnish rallycross courses before being acquired by a notable Swedish collector in 1991. So that’ll be six years of extreme punishment then, not that the car wouldn’t have taken this all in its stride.

Despite introducing the world of rallying to four-wheel-drive, when the full Group B regulations were introduced no amount of modifying was going to allow the production-based car to compete with the purpose-built efforts from Peugeot and Lancia, who dominated with their 205 T16 and Delta S4 respectively. 

History will show that the Peugeot was the car to beat, winning both championships to run under Group B rules, but to this day many a rally fan would point to the Audi Quattro as being the most influential machine of its era. The car you see here played a major role in establishing Audi’s idea of transmitting an engine’s output to all four wheels of a rally car. Finding another like this for sale would be a neat trick …

Of course, all that provenance comes at a price and it’s £440,000. Mind you, for that you get a car which is fully recommissioned to Group B spec’ (although it could be returned to comply with Group 4 rules), is road registered and ready for some historic rallying. Or as vendor Joe Macari Performance Cars points out, it could just as easily take pride of place in a museum.

We reckon it would look at its best, though, with several stages’ worth of mud and shale adorning its flanks.