Hillclimb-Spec Widebody Audi Quattro is Pikes Peak Perfection

so [Applause] [Music] what's up guys lara chan here we are at the base of pikes peak this is another episode of hoonigan autofocus where we focus on some of the coolest autos in the world this one especially is very cool and we have the owner here david heckl how are you i'm doing fine larry how you doing this morning yeah i forgot your coffee sorry no it's okay it's okay so uh this is monday morning the day after the pikes peak international hill climb where you actually competed in this i don't even know what to call it street car rally car it's totally fine montana totally fine in montana uh something crazy uh how did you do by the way how was your run-up we ended up sixth in class so the goal this year honestly this was our seventh year what we wanted to do is take out well not take but displace walter royal's time basically beat us 10-47 and then we found out david rowe had a 1043 and david's got a short wheelbase this is a long wheelbase quattro with widened fenders out of germany but that didn't happen and we lost a motor two weeks ago so we had to find another one in the room next door and uh so that owner i think knows about it at this point in time so it'll be really exciting if we end up owning that one too um or he maybe wants it back for um provenance because he's bike speak motor that being said okay so i'm just gonna say it outright so i'm i've been following the pikes peak international hill climb since 2011 since the last year of the dirt i think my one of my favorite shots from that whole event actually i have two um is of gesture in the 997 gt2 rs just swinging that thing around in the dirt with people so close like they could basically high-five him exactly right they could touch his the nose of his bumper um it was that car and then it was a subaru gc8 i forgot who was driving that um but it it just like it felt like old school rally there was no rules and of course since then a lot of rules have changed and of course the whole mountain is paved but you essentially are still bringing this rally car to this just all tarmac track i i honestly have to say this is probably my favorite car this year all right then larry i can't thank you enough for saying that because it's our favorite car and it's our favorite car because we grew up on these things so in the midwest uh quattro was a big thing out of minnesota the quattro club had started and as a youngster just well it goes back to when i was six and so that was on the autobahn uh we were there for the entire summer with my family i've got 64 second cousins in bavaria and we were screaming down the autobahn and i was in the back of their 911s and it was just that's what i wanted to do and you know when growing up going fast that was just you get velocitized so to speak at a young age and it was always just every little kid in matchbox cars and hot wheels and then we got to this and to tell you the truth this car originally started as my daily driver which was ingo's car out of michigan and i had a pile of these things i had like four or five of these original quattros and i said well it's rusty enough that we can cut it apart paste put it back together and then i moved to colorado in 2007 and i said we're doing this i said because i had been over in europe i went to visit karsten at kuranova tech up in norwichtown and he builds the panels for these and every other wildest dream audi that you want s1 e2 replicas michelle mouton shorties anything that you want he can do it and so we went up and visited him and he showed us around he's like anything that you want i'll put it together for you so the package was shipped literally to chicago in 2007 i moved that february to denver for work and i've never gone back because you gain years of age the more you move west and so you being from california or in california you're gonna live a long time we'll be together for a long time we cut it apart in 2012. we said we're gonna do this we took out the fia rule book for 2012 wrc specs and literally we went page by page brought in chrome ollie from germany specifically oversized because if we're going to do this on this mountain which is 156 turn rally stage tarmac uh rally tarmac stage we want to be safe so we just stripped it i did it in my garage in lakewood i flew in these guys from across the country for uh about six months on weekends and we force multiplied the numbers so if you have five guys eight hours a day ten hours a day etc you just do the math and we're got stuff done and just kept every year has been an evolution and so i was just talking to my wife this morning about five am and she said so do you feel good about where you did and i said well we got an 11 10. two years ago we got 11 14 you know from where we were and we really wanted to be in the tens but we're the only one in the class without aero and so we've been talking to many people and everybody wants to help really globally at this point because they love this car it's the only one of its kind in the united states and we're the only clowns that are sending it up i speak every year because it's in our backyard and we owe it to everybody else to do it um sir you're you're just driving a box of pikes peak like yeah there there's no i mean i guess you could call this arrow i'm not exactly sure how much downforce this is doing you know it's like the ducktail the porsche in the 70s uh it has the bolt holes to put the oil cooler which is what audi had an oil cooler in there because they couldn't fit anything else because when the engineers went through it they didn't leave you a straw's chance of putting anything else in the front and there's nothing like driving a front end or basically all your weight is forward so the thing is tail happy so they always send me up with 150 pounds of fuel in the back just to keep it settled especially at the top end and you know i fight them tooth and nail because we wanted a 3.99 pound per horsepower car we technically had it two weeks ago and it was amazing um and that motor goes at christmas time it'll go back to our friend jeff in kansas to make it better again and we'll have it for next year but yeah it's a total box it's literally crazy it's a square so your first drive of the mountain was in 2012 i was lucky enough to be there to capture that and that was actually the year a drift car won overall if you could believe it or not and that that's kind of the thing about pikes peak is anything can happen on race day i always say you know the mountain doesn't lie she tells the truth she'll let you go up if she wants should give us good sunsets if we could be lucky enough to kind of receive those or clouds or whatever you know and for you guys it's good conditions and even yesterday the race was delayed by almost two hours due to ice i think at the top right yeah and larry i mean i know you love sunshine and good photographic images et cetera but there's every single year we at some point year in year out we're gonna get caught in snow hail et cetera and i've been in a two-hour hail storm up at the top when it rolled in i've got the footage from that from i think it's like 2017. marcel was in in the side with me came down from the from the finish line and we literally had our feet off the ground as lightning was pounding around us but that's what i asked for like why can't we run in the snow because that would be awesome it would just be the perfect race it would just be literally like uh ken block going sideways but it's like war on snow you i know for sure i know there's rumors of it and it's been something that's been talked about for a long time but uh actually d paving or unpaving uh pikes peak i think you would be probably the number one fan of that because you could do all the drive slides not that you don't right now you could do all-wheel drive slides pretty much around every corner uh let's just talk about the car i don't know too much about this so did this car ever come out in the u.s it did so 198 well and if you want to know maybe this is a fractured story but you had engineers back in the late 70s uh at the arctic circle and they were testing the iltus and that was the military car audi volkswagen was doing for the german military kind of like a jeep but ultimately uh power plant based on what they had at the time and then they were thinking about a sedan a turbocharged sedan or maybe it was the other way around i think that's the history ultimately the two the two people that were doing different projects were about 600 yards apart they came and talked and they're like what are you working on well we're really working on this turbocharged sedan et cetera and we're working on this military four-wheel drive vehicle and they said why don't we go back to headquarters and ask if we can mate them and that was the germination of what this quattro was really kind of back of the napkin thought and so they took pieces parts and we've got one of one of the united states first people to drive carl bear he drove a cuatro that was brought over as a test car in michigan way back in the early 80s and the son of the dealership owner in michigan trashed it basically just destroyed it the night before um the first night they got it in the state so it never made it to colorado but that being said the original quattro was basically born out of the idea of doing a gt perfectly done it was still like a seven or eight second or six seven seconds to 60 miles an hour in a five cylinder 10 valve and it was a hit they only brought over approximately i would say it's less than 600 cars to the united states from 83 to 85 84's being the rarest and then they came out with the sport quattro and the sport quattro is even lesser of a build which 12 inches out of it a different rake of the front windshield and that's the one that audi went to test with um they went dominated with this car the long wheel-based original quattro uh in the 80s and then they had to do like corsica and they needed to cut it short and walter was really the only one who as the teammates would say could control that beast as as it was um but we just got inspired about it and its handling is amazing uh in a street car version it's got center diff lock and rear diff lock with two different settings on the plunger as you pull out or switch however you had it and it is just unstoppable there's nothing like we've got a 15 incline at the house up in the mountains and the f2 350 can't get anywhere close and you put one of these in there it just goes like a scalded cat up two feet two feet of snow so this um it's kind of fun actually to watch you drive by up on pikes peak because you kind of have to go gingerly around the corners right you're running are you running street tires are you running no those well there's yeah those are kind of as close as you can get they're not slicks full slicks this next year with probably hoosiers is what we're thinking of as we talk to friends who who are who are doing them um but yeah this wheel package this was bran gladstone at fixie uh met him at the met a friend of his at the table at pebble beach last year in 2019 and they said uh what do you do for you know for fun i'm like a racist junk up uh by speaking he's like wait i've seen that before you need to talk to my friend brandt he just bought fixy wheels and so bran and i got in touch and brandt said i want my wheels on your car the package came you know about four weeks ago and they're seven pounds per corner lighter than the wheels we were running before and it's just phenomenal it's just they look great they look period that's kind of the point right yeah and they were accustomed to what we wanted everything no more spacers no more anything it was our offset everything cut to what we wanted the look that we wanted the dish that we wanted it was just perfect and the three-piece forge so we're super excited about this um but as i was saying you're basically putt-putting around the corners but then when you go on throttle it's like earth shattering yeah like that motor sings and on top of that it's just like it's like you do pull a wheelie almost when you accelerate even if you're on like a long straightaway and then it's just like screaming and then you shift and it goes back to screaming and you go back to like pop on a wheelie pretty much um it's it's so dramatic compared to pretty much all of the other cars up there like all a lot of the cars especially the fast cars rely so much on arrow especially over the bumps right keeps them planted and maybe they have a lot stiffer suspension than you i don't actually really know but it seems like just from watching you it seems like it's more of like a rally setup it is it is and it originally was even crazier as a rally setup before we went to kw and so we don't even have a competition version yet that was a discussion we had last week when we thought you know at the end of cog cut we took the whole car sideways and went into a wallow and then we came back and the wheels were like this in the front and they're like what did you do and i was like i didn't do anything i just did what you told me just get to the top and we went back got an alignment in denver and we called the head of motorsports north america for kw they took the call which is exciting but we've been running them for years and they said well you should really be on a competition package the fact is is that a car like this has to be a little bit loose if you make it super stiff it doesn't have the ability to just kind of walk over and these are troughs peak to trough probably 12 inches at the top this year uh as far as yumps and the car literally gets so light and catches air but the beauty part about this thing is there's a lot of trail braking for me that goes on it left foot braking that goes on at the bottom end and same at the top because you're in one gear that might not be right for that corner and you got to have that car be able to take a set and not be so like a stone skipping across the water and that's the fun part about it because it is responsive it is responsive if you know how to drive it just like a 911 if you lift throttle oversteer it's going to loop itself this one you can you can do crazy things with a quattro especially the setup i mean we've got an rs6 rear end on it um custom chromoly uh subframes custom chromaly cell programs that we had made in poland uh from albert and at the end of the day it's just the underpinnings of it just keep getting better every year because we've got everybody literally around the planet like giving us good ideas and wanting to see it continue well let's check it out if you could uh let's start off with the engine bay this is kind of the centerpiece of the car so this is actually not your original motor that you wanted to run this year right the other motor we had built uh probably about three years ago and we'd run it as a 2.5 capable of over a thousand at the wheels the cranks are custom made out of california and we've also got the cams were out of belgium um so this is just a five cylinder that you could have bought in 93 to 95 and so this how many liters is this one then 2.2 so this came in the 93 to 95 s4 and s6 motor this one has pistons in it um and rods and that's it uh and we took actually the cams off the car off the motor that toasted itself two weeks ago it didn't toast itself it was running just fine uh after one of our fastest runs in the midsection and uh rob holland and i were talking about it and we're like yeah we're just a little off we're about you know seven seconds off what our times were last year and the car is just idling but there's just this just a little knock on it and it turns out we we took out we took out all the electrodes on all five spark plugs so there was three three electrodes so 15 of them kind of some stayed in the motor and someone out the tailpipe most likely uh it ended up being a timing pin on the flywheel that ground into the back of the motor uh down near the input shaft which mushroomed that pin and then it was going around and snap nailed the timing sensors and so our our timing was way probably advanced ridiculously and um got really really messed up but it still ran ran into the trailer ran around the block um testament to the first build um but so this one how much power does this one make this is putting out 450 at the wheels 452 that's so crazy to me because it's it seems like it's putting out a lot more when you pass by me it's really is the noise that this thing makes it makes all of the right noises yeah and that's the one thing as everybody everybody remembers even the porsche crowd that comes over to talk to us in the pits etc some have had tears in their eyes in the past because the sound it's that five-cylinder sound that and really when the turbo over spins and it's the chirp which we don't have it set up for that but you know the stall the compressor stall and that sound is unlike anything else like a five cylinder on full song it just has there's just something about it there's a couple things about this motor um or actually i've seen a couple quattros in europe and one of the first things that really surprised me is how forward the motor actually is in the engine bay and it's amazing to me that with that setup in terms of cooling because that's kind of near the stock setup right pretty much yeah it's amazing that it could keep this cool yeah that was no problem this this is dialing radiator out of uk and it's fantastic i mean they really did already they really did a great job on this thing and this is an rs2 fan so this is like a porsche audi hodgepodge of the real rs2 that they built back in the 90s and so having that fan does all of the work and there's an auto low and high that kicks on so we've never had a problem with that really we've never had a problem with cooling etc on this thing so i see why some people run without that headlight then yeah because then it's just a lot more airflow i mean like looking at this it seems like there's so much blocking that whole package exactly we have yet to we have yet to spend any time thinking about when it comes down to it we've thought about it but actually putting into practice when you come four weeks eight weeks out that's like the last thing on our list is to basically finally duct it because we haven't had any cooling problems so our temps are really good um but we've got work to do for next year and so that'll be ducting and then what we're talking about is the dry sump system because when you're railing on this thing more or less uh we've got an 8500 rev limiter on the old motor this one's down to 7 500 so my power band is really about 5 000 to 7 500 so to keep it in there oil sloshing around and it kind of turns to water so we're gonna send probably a bigger system to the back for cooling and we'll have to figure out you know the europeans have done it for 25 years put the cooling in the back and go dry sump with it and then we will have the ability we could probably shove the motor shorten everything back um a la audi sport in the center the center tunnel has direct bolt in to the transmission so we don't have any transmission wing arms anymore to hold it so the car has gotten more and more structurally rigid within the cage so the tub itself is feeling those stresses when we ran with the other motor and in terms of safety what you're saying like you guys really went all out in terms of tying in everything with the cage um and plus like a legitimate fire suppression system yeah i think the motor was more important for me than me at this point in time so we put two up there and then i'm like let's put two on me and one in the back by the by the fuel but the you know the sport the original sports had bracing that went all the way down to the front and that's another tie-in that we can still do because as stiff as it seems and it is pretty stiff we can definitely do a little bit more um just so that the chassis holds together a little bit better but it does have flex there's no doubt about it a lot of the cars when you see in super slow motion the whole body starts to flex well it's an old car i mean what year is it 37 years old 36 the oldest in class by 17 years this year amazing i mean it's so cool to see this because like even the oil cooler right this is so cool yep it's like not that much smaller than that it seems like just from the naked eye you know yeah um and one of the things under acceleration and deceleration is you know you got that oil slosh and so audi basically figured it out by plumbing and having this this system basically to catch and so this is an oversized catch can that we custom did and it's got multiple baffles in it and so it helps and as soon as we did that because we've done everything but go to dry sump and been totally fine with the way that this is working we have none of those issues but as soon as we take that next step there's really going to be nothing left to do other than doing suspension and then what i was explaining to margaret my wife you got a tune and aerodynamics is just as much tuning as tuning this motor you got one tweak here one tweak there and there's not many places to test it on a flat track surface here out in colorado so you can't you can't mimic that and you can't mimic the thin air either so how it's going to handle is going to be our challenge over the next 364 days tell me about this turbo setup here so um 3071 gen x that was new new the year before last it's fantastic it's it's a it's just sized right for the motor that we have we could go to something a little bit larger but yet has better spool and we still have to do another downpipe because the exhaust manifold that one's been around that actually got pulled out of another rally car that i had that still has that i use on the ice during the winter and that one has so many cracks in it so we've got to redo and make it truly equal length there's a couple one or two pipes that are not absolutely perfect so that's going to be done as well but we've been really excited with working with garrett over the years and they're at this point pretty much hit the point whatever you need just let us know well let's talk about the outside a little bit there's just so much to talk about i'm sorry i want to go so detailed in this because this is so interesting to me um i'll be honest i don't know too much about audi's unfortunately i didn't get a chance to really grow up around them but i do have to say in terms of modern audis the rs3 is my favorite because oh my god i've gone 185 miles an hour in one on the autobahn and it had plenty left to go so it probably could have gone 200. yeah and we talked about we we literally talked about this over the last couple weeks larry is that the 07k is the motor that came out with the ttrs and it's you can get it longitudinal longitudinal on the car and that being said but it's a different platform with its own issues so to speak and so the original five-cylinder motor 20 valve you know we've just been picking up those motors over the years and storing them because to run this platform gets you that sound the 007k doesn't have that sound it has something similar and david rowe runs it as well uh overseas as keith edwards does in their shorties uh they're short versions i just can't get away from that sound and so to do that we want to keep that that platform as long as possible and that was really a flagship it debuted with like 227 horsepower back in in the early mid 90s that was that was amazing but the car is capable of so much more you really really are so uh uh cognizant i guess of the of a byproduct that doesn't make you go any faster you know you're really so you that's something you want to tune you know that's something that you want to keep and that's something that you're it's so important to you is this byproduct because i mean as you know the electric cars they don't make any sound at all and in fact they make a very annoying sound which is the sirens that they have to run um that's actually a safety thing for us so because we can't hear them coming around the corner if we can hear a little bit of a sign then we know they're coming around the corner but it's really cool that you're it's so important to you i mean how can we say this everybody thinks i'm type a uh probably you know there's some there's some truth to that and everything has to be perfect but eventually as you grow older you have like more money than time and when you're younger you have all these dreams hopes and and things like that and you have no money but you've got all the time in the world so having grown up with a carr family and all the relatives in europe that i've been over there almost every year since 1976 and every year i'm renting now that i'm older renting the car just to test you know an audi product bmw product just to go around and we're carving canyons we're carving uh down in austria as well we're doing whatever we can just to see what's going on but it all comes back to this this is kind of feels like home at this point and it's taken years to make sure that this this is like a glove to me is as so much as i have a regular street version that we were using in winter because the pedal set up the same muscle memory everything's in the exact same location and so at that point the heritage is so important and maybe that's part of the bavarian culture that i grew up in but it's so important because this is seems to be a forgotten everybody harkens back to it and they think about it and we see it for advertising purposes but it is still amazing that that we can keep something like this and preserve it and fan fest about five years ago husband and wife came up from south america just to see this car and so the car's important like not not the clown behind the wheel it's it's literally this represents something to kids that says you can do this we did it in a garage granted it's been refined over the years but you can do this and all he wanted to do is get down and touch the car and then have me sign his little his his rally gloves from south america and i was like you know i was almost moved to tears because he was in tears and at that point it became very very important to me to make sure that other people there's still some some things like this going around and germany sweden switzerland everybody's got something like this going on it's just in the states it's it's the ability to get close to it touch it and hear it and this place is the perfect place to display it every single year so we'll keep doing it as long as they keep inviting us all right so the outside a couple things so tell me a little bit about this this can't be stock no so it originally came with box flares everybody loves box flares whether it was on like the peugeot the weather wasn't well actually the mitsubishi starring has some killer killer lines to it but it originally came with box flares on it that were formed as well so they actually have direct shelves into them and they're more angular these are the wide bodies and so is this metal no it's fiberglass okay you can get it in carbon fiber as well fiberglass is a little bit easier to work with if you get something uh if you ding it up or you crack it or something like that but like it lines up so well yeah because this is all stock or this can't be this game this is like a sport quattro front uh and same as this as well and the hood and the fenders that's what the sport quattro had but that was carbon kevlar aramid and that was specially made for audi and so a quarter panel from audi if you still own a sport quattro and i might be going out of school here but if you can't get parts for it in the united states unless you have the vin number for it and you own it and so if you show audi that and you need a new carbon kevlar yeah you'll spend seven grand they'll overnight it to you and uh it'll be here wait it's actually from audi this is not from audi this kit we bought from kura nova tech in nordstrom in the north of germany and so he does replicas and so but that is an exact copy that's off a buck from a sport quattro the whole wide body in the rear so everything is grafted this is just bolted in and yeah there's going to be some every kit that you buy across the planet is going to have some fitting issues which you can fill in or and in 2012 we were like 45 days out for the race so we're like yeah let's get the release the reliefs better on the hood than the quarter but this was all so this was originally box flare's back you actually have to cut a section of metal out and then you lay these in over and you use a 3m product basically to to seize it in or basically fuse it together and then sheet metal screws hold it for 24 hours and then it comes off and it is literally like rock-solid it looks great though i mean i can't actually tell where it was put on right yeah which was the process and going out and inhaling um inhaling fiberglass resin for about 25 days in the garage at night i would go out there and i would just hand sand just to different levels to make sure that that feather edge you would never be able to see it all the way back here and then you tie it in this is all still down here this is part of the original back here is all hand blended in including this this is still fiberglass and oh this is like how wide it how much wider it is yeah and so the original factory one is like right there so that gives us the ability to run 10 inch wide wheels at this point in time because we just had this quarter the mold that it was taken off of in germany was slightly off so it was in probably about an inch and so what we did probably about two months ago we had some friends out here that are just amazing with restorations they actually feathered this out and pulled it and matched the other side and so now we can run whatever size we want uh and it looks pretty good it actually looks like you can even go a little wider now yeah we're thinking about it yeah because right here these wheels were running basically a size smaller 255s we can probably go 265 to 75 and where the maximum amount of contact patch that we can get will help as we keep raising the power we're not going to stop at 550 because it's got so much capability and it still wants to breathe so whatever we can get this is kind of neat so is this like a this is the factory this is the way they had it at the factory minus this so in a sport quattro that's widened like this but a sport quattro has 12 inches cut out of it it's shortened and the windshield rake is actually moved forward and so in order to make a shorty which we're going to do we're gonna have probably two or three more made in the mountains i'll have the garage built up there at our place uh sometime june of next year and we'll be able to shove all the collector collections that i've got over the years the porsches the old audis things like that put them in one place and have them on display that being said cutting that out and moving it this was an original gas flap for the car whether it was the original stock 83 or it was the sport and so we just decided that was the easiest place closest to the battery that's so cool it's like functional it's still you know a button or uh to shut off we thought yeah we thought about putting it back to an original gas tank uh to allow us to fill from here but yeah and what what does the license plate mean so it means mischievous if you go back in really old german dictionaries some people would say unholy there is something completely uh and witchcraft is in there as well when you drive the mistress that's called quattro there is a certain mystique about it and you have to you have to be able to handle it because it's got some crazy things that it can do if it's driven in the right way and not necessarily anger but there's a little bit of finesse and it will do things that just blow your mind and this is one of the places that we test that out every year and you have to creep closer every single year this year got a little hairy when we were going we just happened to be at the right place at the right time placement on the track and we shot up towards the straightaway at the top second straight away at the top towards cut and i was literally going faster than i've ever gone in the last seven years and that corner is coming up and that's that doesn't necessarily become a kink as it looks like a 90 and you're just gonna fly off the end of it so i had to bring it back and i had to break for the first time because i think if i didn't and we had hail we had a little bit of grapple a little bit of snow and just needed to hold on that was a real pucker factor for this year that's good to know i really like the livery too it's very simple what is that like that's a crest from the donald reese region in bavaria so all the family the family that lives over in baden-wurttemberg wonderful awesome my mom's side that the base is in bavaria so the massive amount of family that i have is there and the donald reese that's a specific cow cow town area small towns and super close to to all things cars so in the south you've got roof you've got angle shot that's a little to the east there's not a year that we don't go by the museum and check out audi in fact going there to get hats for these guys i get them swag every year that i go because i've got the opportunity to do so and so going there the guy behind the counter said oh so you like audi's as i'm buying up all the historic 85 rally hats you know that they wore for michelle and walter and some of the schwag and he said oh yeah so you like to do and oh yeah the guy that helps out he does the the kits and and puts the factory cars back in shape he said he lives down right the street he's a friend of mine and he's like here's his number let's call him see if he can get lunch with him so tried to get in touch with him and have lunch that day he wasn't available but that's on the ticket for next year when there's no covid that's so cool i just it's just so simple but it adds so much to to this livery or or to this the look of the car um and you have porsche brakes which is kind of cool stays in the family yep absolutely we have boxers fronts and rears and so those handle they'll handle a capability for years i mean we could go with big reds but when i showed up in 2012 i had the original 15s so they were r8 and those are like 30 spokes and et of 24 etc the fact is i was on like 10 year old rain tires because i didn't have anything else what else did we have and we really had no options to run what was talking i was in 2012 or two yeah 2012. we we were the only car without any sort of slick or near slick everybody at that point even eight years ago now that i think about it they were all set up and we were just these new kids uh what was your time in 2012 i think we put down like a 12 50 12 40 something like that that's not bad for street tires no and the best part about it it was it was it was well we didn't 2012 i think we made it i'll have to think back 2012 was the year of the fire so they moved it to august and i think we we made it halfway we got timed out because jeremy foley had his incident [Applause] yeah jeremy went off he was two cars ahead of us we were shut down for five or six hours and so at that point it was rain hail and snow and we got halfway so they cut us at glen cove and so at that time was probably like six something i want to say and we were completely sideways and it was awesome a total barrel of monkeys before we even had gopros hooked up to it but then we moved got some better tires over the years we were running like hand cooks rs3s things like that but it was still 15 inches so we were running a modified sport quattro front rotor with a special um still big uh boxster brakes not box duress at that point and so that was the only thing that would fit under a 15. now that we moved to 17 we have options and like i said we could do big reds but that's more stopping power than you ever need on this mountain i know people get really over braked uh for this and it just it's it's extra extra weight there's so many cool things to talk about so um like these are lexan yeah right but the front is still oh yeah still a factory piece of glass so that was one of the last pieces of glass i was working on the car i was working on the this car back in 2013 in the garage and a tool dropped on the windshield and because you can't get them anymore and if you find them they're like hence teeth and you just have to stock up i had a friend w g giles who was a national production rally champion in the 90s and wg had one of the last pieces of glass in his closet in the original bubble wrap from audi and he was coming out to steamboat to run ice driving with us as well and wg drove this thing across country in the back of his car and we had a new windshield and hagerty was already insuring the car back in that time and i called him and they said so what happened i was like yeah tool fell and snapped the corner and she said all right so we can't find any of these and i said yeah we'd have to go to europe and we've tried to do deals with audi uh historic before and they wanted like for 30 windshields like 15 000 and there's no guarantee that it's going to come over unbroken so this one they said whatever his gas costs are whatever his fuel is any lodging we'll pay for all of that and the windshield and i was like that's totally an awesome insurance company so this has been the same windshield since then and hopefully we don't snap another one i had the last one another last one that was in ohio about six months ago through ppg classic and it got destroyed by uh one of the unnamed two big companies that delivered it came shattered in the box oh no so i'll have to take a trip over uh probably in spring of next year to germany get some contacts together bring a crate over something like that because i'm not the only one that's in need um i noticed there's no e-brake no unfortunately it would be nice what's going on with that how's how's it that there's no e-brake it's a single channel that runs to the back um and so to plumb that in we used to have it and at this point it's really not necessary anymore and it was just there was a bunch of um metal associated with those just weight and so we really don't need it anymore so we just took it out so none of these ever had a e-brake to go around corners easier they did absolutely the factory one sat right here there was a long handle here and you just yank on it and you can totally do your parking brake turns and it's and it disconnects the front or how does that work it just goes right to the rear it was connected it was connected by cable to springs that just tug down the brakes back there so then what would you do you would just clutch in and then pull pull it you could do that or you could even stay in it and then just pull it and you know there's there's video of the professionals for audi as well walter and stig and michelle etcetera they you don't see so much of it but they did use the handbrake quite a bit because it was much more efficient than you know heel toe downshifting and you know slamming you don't have all the room necessary to do the wags in some of the corners so it's just lift the e-brake interesting and because um because of the center diff it basically allows it almost to to lock up more versus the front yep so i mean you could lock the center and then you have 50 50 weight distribution or 50 50 brake force distribution sorry you could do that and then that car when you lock this we don't have that ability anymore so now we've got basically a torsion uh torque sensing uh diff and then the rear is the rs6 rear end of that and we've got a wave track in there so things are doing it's a lot different it's there's more they're friction devices it's no doubt and so you don't have so much control over just locking at 50 50 and you could even lock up the rear diff in the old so it's exact rotation on both sides and that's what we do at steamboat so the cars that we do use there on ice we definitely play with that because coming out of the corner you just have this everything's moving forward just clawing like a scalding cat so is this a stock transmission though this is an o1e so the stock transmission was a 389 um five speed from audi with the 10 valve now that we've moved to the 20 valve we were running we moved to a 411 which gave us a little bit more grunt out of the corners but the stock limit on a 411 which came in audi 4 000 sedans normally aspirated in the 80s like we were putting down 550 in that and people in europe basically we weren't blowing them up and they're like how are you doing that well you have to be really ginger on your application of throttle and just don't abuse them and they were blown away that we were still running a stock because you could find them in junkyards if you're lucky and just pulling 411s out of the junkyard so now that we move to an 0-1e it doesn't shift as well but that's more of a modern 90s transmission if you will and it's a totally stock transmission at this point so what did it actually come out of then this came out of uh basically the sedans so you're talking 93 to 95 s4 s6 sedans and you can find these all day long and so that's the nice part about it but it will get some different gearing ratios for next year that probably will help better match what's coming out of the engine bay um this cage is absolutely crazy like wow i mean you mentioned jeremy foley like we've seen you know cages and safety equipment save lives uh this is really really really stout i mean we kept we kept going back to the drawing board and we were looking at it and as we went through page after page of the book the fia spec book of what they wanted we just kept going a little bit further further and we're literally in a garage at two in the morning in lakewood and i mean the reason it fits as well as it was was because the attention to details so the former owner of the house that i had with 2500 square foot garage he had a lift he inherited a bunch of lola's and and sports cars and an amazing company that does mandrel bending it's here in denver and he does aircraft and aerospace bending and so this was done on solidworks so we sat in here for hours and hours and measured and then we put it in solidworks tested it and then we had blueprints made of every single one and we took it to eric and eric's like yeah i'll totally do this and he came back and everything just fit in like lincoln logs it was absolutely perfect and then we mig welded it after talking to lincoln motorsport welding a program that i actually went through a couple years and it was about 20 years now i was at a vacation i had some extra vacation i'm like i want to get welding certified and so we did that but the cage was actually welded by my neighbor who was a marine or a navy welder and he had gone through their program and we just sat there cut and pasted this used to have a sunroof and so if you look at the top it's really hard to tell because i spent so much time putting a cut piece of curved exactly maybe it's a 16th or a little bit thicker and then we sat there and i sanded it for what seems like days to get rid of so many indications yeah you can only tell if you look underneath right yeah that's the plate that i sat there and just hand ground and uh cut up stock dash that is yeah later style so this is the dash that came in the late style uh so it would have been 84 and 85 for the irkus or quattros and so we did that and then added the aim a couple years back still the stock blower in there i wanted heat um but more so these ears i don't need heat i just need defrost that's the same pedal alignment that came in 83 everything's the same we've changed out steering it still has a heater core then over here yeah we're not putting there's i don't think there's one in there at this time it's just a blower oh okay a blower okay and what's this so that's our new addition for this year and i couldn't be more excited so to tell you that it's been a challenge to stay relevant in time attack when cars show up or 1.25 million 77 of them don't necessarily that go into private hands mean it's and you can edit this out but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a production car because in europe there was 12 000 of these made the original qs and so there's plenty of them that have gone around so as a homologation type of thing but this comes out of a gt gt3 rs cup car porsche um electric steering so for the last four years i haven't had any power steering it's all been manual so we've been using a volkswagen 70s fox rack and i can tell you as i've talked to jeff zwart a couple times he's like you got some muscles man to be able to like go through those corners because you have to plan ahead just to steer and it was just a beast of a machine and so this year is the first time we installed it it's all custom the work that we did we ended up in a yard and we pulled out a 98 audi cabriolet rack and had it rebuilt to brand new it was tough for them to find the specs for it but it has i think it's like one and a quarter lock to lock on each side um basically less than three turns lock to lock back and forth almost two and a half at this point and it is fingertips it is truly amazing it sounds like a jet fighter when you fire it up you have to wait for it and it's got this wine that slowly climbs and then you know you can use the steering but it is the best addition we have made it's the craziest thing to me that this is such a hodgepodge of all volkswagen auto group parts but you've like all made it work it's like a hybrid of all of the companies you have to be able to nerd out and so the fact that we've got aerospace guys from um ball etc and former engineers and and well you're always an engineer you're just less uh it doesn't matter at the end of the day we've got really smart people that think about the systems and and part of those systems everyone has to work integrally and to get to 14 000 feet the pressure ratios that you're running in the motor the heating the cooling the steering the the forces on the car are literally trying to tear it apart and so when we think about things the fact that we're into the porsche bin of spare parts makes us happy because we know that there's a ton of engineering that went through and these are remanufactured at this point so to get a new one i think it's a couple thousand dollars and so you can pick up um refurbished ones as well and just stock them well thank you so much for showing us pretty much every little bit of this car um i can't wait to see this thing up next year and honestly i just can't wait to see this again because um this is truly like car culture just in its purest form and you're just trying to keep it alive instead you could easily you said off camera before you could easily get a 911 a gt car from the factory or whatever it came in anything and you could destroy your own time and be very competitive but uh you would rather just drive this thing yeah larry you totally hit it on the head we could run any chassis we wanted to i mean within reason but we definitely have the opportunities to run with porsche and it's nice to have parts galore and just go to the counter and get stuff but at the end of the day this represents something bigger than that and we knew that when we built it in 2012 it was going to be a 10-year program it was going to be an evolution to try and get to where we wanted to be which we want to be in the nines and to be almost close you know i had to back off on the top section this year considerably and i did say earlier that cooling wasn't a problem we had oil temps on this new motor that's literally hours old we had some temps so i had to back off for the whole top section so right when we got to cove and we got some hail rain a little bit of snow and temps basically went through the roof i'm like do i toast this motor as well or do we keep going and i said i want to make this i want to finish this because it's been such a journey this year so we held off a little bit and so that was probably the record maybe or getting close to walter's time in 87 but at the end of the day it's we know this is a longer program and that means we have people from all over the country and all over the world like i said before we've got space engineers as well that throw stuff in the air and circles the globe and continues past pluto and they've got their eyes on this and they're part of the team and because we have to think about pressure ratios at 14 000 feet we have to think about all the effects of the environment that's really trying to tear the car apart and we're going to get there it's just we're late to the party with arrow and it's like but that's baby steps you don't want to come in with a car that's already built that has way more capability than you you drive within your limits and you never try to go to 11 tents because most people who are up there at 11 10 they don't even know they were there and then they backed themselves into a tree or off a cliff or something like that and we just want to take it one step at a time and that's part of building a successful program and a car that basically can be this old and will and will continue to be in the pack yeah well honestly you're inspiring people you're inspiring hopefully others to kind of run a program similar to yours to attack the mountain or just i don't know get into racing in general with older cars right it's it's too boring it would be too boring if everyone had the same car up there you know and that's kind of one of the reasons why i love pikes peak because yeah you have the 20 million dollar whatever however many million dollar volkswagen idr next to something like this or next to another garage built something that's either driven to pike speak or trailered in an open trailer you know versus you you've got something that's flown over from germany in a 747 you know it's like it's the craziest thing it's so cool to see both at the same race attacking the same mountain it is and we're indebted to you and pike speak and everybody for basically capturing the stories and capturing the memories and telling the story because this is one one of the last races in america where you run what you brung type of thing and a lot of stuff is garage built and to be in the same category as people who get paid get flown over you've got wine and cheese parties this that and the other thing and basically they're doing testing for manufacturers all day long and then they're racing professionally and they're trying to do family and friends all that it's like you're right with them and they're so nice you know the fact that you've got rhys millen is like he loves this car too because of his you know he's basically had his rx years ago and to have that still popping up in the day when you've got 1.25 million cars showing up with all the factory support etc it's fun just to be in the mix and that mix actually shifts every single year this was a year of attrition with covid and certainly a lot of people had issues and a lot of people from all over the country had altitude sickness issues they've got car issues you don't know what you're going to get into and that's the beauty of it and so we owe it to everyone else to continue the program and inspire people globally because again it's too much fun it's so much fun and that's why i always say this is like the bucket list race you know this is the one if you want to experience something incredible you definitely have to come to pikes peak i think that's a wrap [Music] me [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] me you

Channel: Hoonigan AutoFocus

Views: 76,810

Rating: 4.8937645 out of 5

Keywords: Audi, Audi Quattro, Pikes Peak Hill Climb, Pikes Peak Hillclimb, PPIHC, Pikes Peak Audi, UR quattro, rally quattro, group b, group b quattro, walter rohrl, lwb quattro, inline 5, I5, 3b, larry chen, larry chen photo, larry chen speedhunters

Id: GCVJ8GggI0s

Length: 53min 15sec (3195 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020