It’s time to head down to the shoreline once again and find out what’s been washed up on the jagged rocks of motoring history. Welcome back to The Carchive.
This series doesn’t always draw people to take the jump like perhaps it should, and this is often because the headline image doesn’t exhibit much zing. The more interesting the picture, the more likely people are to want to know more. Unfortunately, the cover of today’s brochure is one of the most boring I’ve seen in my entire life. I promise it gets more interesting after the jump.


“With the Audi Coupe, Audi have not only been successful in creating a particularly elegant body, but have shown that this can be combined with providing room for all the family”
What?! How boring! Audi had here a car which shared its silhouette with that legend of gravel and tarmac, the Ur Quattro, and from some angles, if you dim the lights and squint a bit, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in the presence of Mouton or Mikkola’s preferred ride. Yet not once in this brochure is that fact mentioned.
This particular brochure deals with the post 1984 facelifted version. The Coupe and the Quattro were released pretty much in parallel, but the lesser car was, obviously, hugely simplified over the four-wheel-drive machine with its Walter-Smith wheelarches. Common to both, though, was the availability of a warbling, soulful five-cylinder engine.

“the Audi Coupe is a sprinter as well as a long distance runner; a true grand tourer”.
The Quattro obviously grabbed all the headlines, but the lesser car wasn’t entirely lacking in spirit. Its 2.2 litre engine lacked the tickling from Kühnle, Kopp & Kausch and made do with 136hp. But they were delivered to only the front wheels without the transmission losses inherent to AWD machineries, and this combined with reduced weight allowed 0-62 in 8.6 seconds with 126mph arriving if you kept your toe down long enough.
If performance wasn’t the be all and end all, you could opt for a two-litre version of the same, with 115hp, or for rather more pedestrian ambitions of speed, there was a 1.8 litre four with just 90hp to its name. If you had given up completely on the concept of excitement, the teaming this engine with a slushbox yielded a 105mph maximum, with 62mph coming up after 13.3 loooong seconds.  Before the 1984 facelift a 1.6 version had been available. Shudder.

“People wishing to buy a different car will find that the Audi Coupe has been designed for them”.
Yep. This was correct. The Audi Coupe didn’t have a great many direct rivals. There was a two-door version of the BMW 3-Series sedan, but that wasn’t really a coupe, and all rival coupes (Ford Capri et al) were a good deal less sedan-like than the Audi, if you get what I mean. I suppose the Opel Manta hatchback was close in concept, and the Sierra XR4i shared the same three-door fastback practicality, as well as having a good bit of poke when needed. The Audi, though, had arguably greater cachet.
And it was helped by the halo-effect of the car’s styling. Few cars were as distinctive, and the ’84 facelift further improved the looks, introducing some light rounding off of extremities which effectively hid the wrinkles, and continued to do so for a good few years yet. At this point I would like to register my hope that factory-tinted rear light clusters will come back into vogue.

“The interior of all Coupe versions allows for comfortable hours of travel”
Though it did begin to become dated, the Coupe interior remained a strong point thanks to its versatility. The silhouette allowed for rear headroom that wasn’t hugely more restricted than at the front, and the minimal tapering of the cabin made for decent elbow-room for two rear passengers, or the option of a third if a little shoulder-contact was acceptable.
Looking through this brochure it strikes me that the Coupe was one of those cars which has greater appeal now than it did when it was in production. Looking back it stood out from the standard Audi Sedan range far more then than the equivalent Audi A5 Coupe does today, and though some pundits labelled the sharp-edged styling “frumpy” at the time, today it looks light and crisp and poised.
Ain’t time a funny thing?
(All images are of original manufacturer publicity material, photographed by me. Copyright remains property of Audi AG, who now sell cars in about five times as many market niches as they did in the ‘eighties. The Ur Quattro ended production in 1990, but it doesn’t stop Audi wheeling one out for display every now and again to remind the world what they used to be so good at)