It's a bit old and battered and features a succession of price stickers that show a decline from $17.95 to $11.95 to $9.00. At a secondhand book sale I paid half of that - so for me, it was a mighty $4.50.
And what a superb book it is!
Called simply 'Supercar Road Tests' it was first published in 1984 (ISBN 060035041X). And what's in it? It's full of the road tests originally published in the UK magazine Motor - tests which are careful, thorough and thoughtful.
Making it of considerable relevance to us in this century is both the choice of cars and what was said about some of them.
The choice of cars? Are you already saying, 'I can't afford them - so who cares?' Well, yes you can - the used car market hasn't always been kind to those cars that were then giants in contemporary performance. Sure, the tested Aston Martin Vantage will set you back rather a lot, but the Mercedes 500SEC and Jaguar XJS-HE are both relative chickenfeed these days. Like, a pristine 500SEL might cost you $25,000, with the Jag substantially cheaper again.
Other cars in the book include the BMW 635 CSi (another cheapy these days), the BMW M1 (er, not cheap at all!), the Porsche 928S, Porsche 911 3.3 Turbo, Lotus Espirit Turbo, Ferrari Mondial Quattrovalvole - and the Audi Quattro.
And it's the Audi Quattro test that most fascinates me. This was the very first turbo constant four-wheel drive high performance road car - ever! Today we are so used to the concept of all-paw turbo traction, it makes reading those first review words on the car quite fascinating.
Probably the first thing you discover when you tentatively start to explore the outer limits of Quattro roadholding is how serenely, how quiet [ly] ,its tyres perform. Push it into bends at speeds which ought to provoke scrub and squeal and the Quattro simply soars round without so much as a chirp of protest. And in manoeuvres that, with any other car, would have the driven wheels spinning and sliding towards the outside of the curve - when sprinting out of a side turn, for example, or powering hard out of a second gear corner - the Audi just goes.
Without wheelspin, without tyre shriek, without drama, it simply catapults away.
So tenacious is its grip that you begin to wonder whether the car has any limits; and then, reminding yourself that no car can defy the laws of physics, to wonder whether you will ever dare to find them. It takes time to gather up the courage (and on narrow roads the car's bulk and left-hand driving position are inhibiting). The steering, for a start, is reassuringly normal: direct, accurate and responsive, light for parking yet weighty enough on the move and providing sufficient feel to let you know what the front wheels are doing. You will learn, too, that almost invariably it will be the front wheels that predictably and safely begin to slide wide first. Understeer is the basic characteristic.
On tight bends it can build up quite strongly, with the Quattro behaving like a front-wheel-drive car. More power increases the understeer rather than breaking the tail away, and lifting off the throttle produces marvellously safe tuck-in to restore grip at the front without inducing instability at the rear.
At higher speeds the basic understeer remains, and so does the fail-safe lift-off reaction. The difference, though, is that through faster open bends you can apply the throttle for positive influence on the car's attitude - to achieve not so much a tail-out drift into oversteer (requiring opposite lock correction) as a reduction of the understeer towards a neutral attitude. That enables you to ease off some steering lock, and perhaps even ultimately achieve a classic four-wheel drift.
So there is nothing daunting about the Quattro's handling, and the technique it requires is not that much different from that demanded by a well-balanced conventional car. The difference is in the Quattro's sheer roadholding: you can go that much faster before you even reach the point where (except on slow, tight bends) it is relevant to talk in terms of understeer and oversteer.
All this applies to driving the Quattro on ordinary surfaced roads in the dry, and in the wet it behaves in much the same way with a phenomenal - but lower - level of grip and perhaps a slightly greater tendency to understeer on tight bends.
And, if you've driven a four-wheel high performance car, doesn't all of that sound so familiar? Of course, the writer of the time had no way of knowing that most of the characteristics that he described are typical of constant all-wheel drive; for him they were specific characteristics of the Audi Quattro.
Trying to find relevant contemporary comparisons was also difficult - try the ABS on a BMW!
We also tested the car's capabilities on roads covered in ice, slush and snow, using for comparison a BMW fitted with ABS anti-lock brakes. It did not take more than a few minutes to discover that for any sort of uphill travel the Quattro's advantage was overwhelming. Where the Quattro re-started on slopes as easily as if it were on dry tarmac, without engaging either of its differential locks, the BMW slithered, crept and spun its rear wheels. Moreover the Quattro proved capable of rocketing away from standstill with stunning acceleration on thick snow - again, even when neither differential lock was engaged.
During some downhill driving on wet roads with many patches of snow, slush and ice, the story was different and not quite so straightforward. Under these conditions the anti-lock brakes of the BMW worked well and proved a significant advantage. But at that stage we had not done much driving with both the Quattro's differentials locked, in which condition the spinning of individual wheels is much limited and a considerable degree of anti-lock capability conferred. Some subsequent snow driving soon established that in this condition the Quattro would slow firmly to a halt when the lack of grip was such that an ordinary car would be sent sliding by a touch on the brakes.
Hmm, I wonder why the fact that ABS and constant four-wheel drive aren't mutually exclusive wasn't even mentioned?
The impact that four-wheel traction made on the magazine's staff is clear - especially when later high power cars were tested. For example, the Mercedes 500SL coupe, was, according to the Motor test,
...one of the world's finest luxury sports cars; beautifully styled and superbly engineered. Its engine and automatic transmission set extremely high standards in terms of smoothness and refinement while in most conditions its handling and roadholding are of the highest order.
And in wet conditions, with a 0-100 km/h time of 7.6 seconds, 205/70 tyres, auto trans and semi-trailing arm rear suspension?
Our only misgiving revolves around the Mercedes' handling in the wet which, with an engine producing close to 300 Ib-ft of torque and driving the rear wheels through an automatic gearbox, can become skittish if care is not taken.
And then the 'how-our-eyes-have-been-opened' bit!
Two years previously we would probably have made little stress of this shortcoming: brutal use of the accelerator with the [Jaguar] XJ-S can easily produce similar characteristics. However, in the past year the waters had been muddied by the arrival of the sensational four-wheel drive Audi Quattro which, although not in the same sports car mould as the Mercedes, shows all too clearly that it is entirely possible to design a virtually fool-proof high performance car which is almost impervious to the coarsest use of throttle and brakes, even in the wet. The arrival of the Audi put the onus firmly on the other manufacturers of high performance cars, particularly those with automatic gearboxes, to improve their wet weather behaviour.
And so why didn't the Quattro make more of an impact on the production of sports cars? Why didn't the enthusiast world fall at its feet - with hundreds of thousands sold?
Like the earlier V8 Jensen FF four-wheel drive, it was because the Quattro was simply too expensive. When new, the Quattro would have sold in Australia for around $60,000 - then the same price as a Ferrari 308GTB and no less than four times the price of a top trim level Commodore SL/E. Using that same Holden benchmark, that makes the car a bit over $200,000 on today's car values...
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