A few neat ones popped up and caught my attention this week, so here’s the roundup! How about this slick RoW 968 in Riviera Blue? Before you get too excited, it’s a Tiptronic. But it’s also a wacky spec, with blue Porsche-script upholstery, no sunroof, and 17″ Cup wheels.
Neat! Not so neat is the asking price – the dealer is looking for $60k, while the car bid to the low 20s on BaT a year ago.
Talk about rare! 90 20V sedans are rare full-stop. This one also has the optional Pearlescent paint and color-matched BBS wheels, and it’s claimed to be an original-owner car. Just as they had with the development of the 10V Turbo for their top tier products, Audi’s work on the Group B, Sport and later RR 20V Quattro (along with the creation of the original S-series cars soon after) trickled down into the rest of the range, but only in a very limited fashion. The 7A 2.3 liter 20V motor was the beneficiary of that racing work, and it was at the time a pretty impressive unit. Out of 2.3 liters, Audi squeezed a very reliable 164 horsepower with a screaming 7,200 RPM redline. While it’s true this was down on peak power to racing motors like the M3’s S14, the adding of the second cam and a modern EFI engine management also yielded nearly 160 ft.lb of torque.
So why does everyone claim that this car was underpowered? Weight. The luxury-oriented B3 was most popular in Coupe form, where at 3,300 lbs in 1991 it needed a diet. It was 30 horsepower down on the BMW, and weighed 500 lbs more, with a more frontward weight bias. A performance car this did not make, and the result was that the expensive Audis leisurely gained speed. Despite the near 50% power increase over the outgoing Coupe GT, a stock B3 Coupe Quattro shared near identical 0-60 times and cost $10,000 more.
But if you were a clever buyer, you could get slightly better performance out of the 4-door variant of the naturally aspirated double overhead cam inline-5. That’s because concurrent with Coupe production, the motor and drivetrain was offered in the slightly lighter 90 quattro 20V.
Inexplicably this one has no full-frame photos that really give us a good look at the condition, but it has some needs from what I can see. Still, it’s mostly original and appears to be in good overall shape.
Like the B3, the Corrado has always been a car I’ve been fascinated with and considered owning. When it launched in the late 1980s as a replacement to the ancient Scirocco, the Corrado was (once again) Volkswagen’s attempt to appeal to the Porsche crowd. With the supercharged G60 motor that may have been somewhat farcical, but when VW dropped the narrow-angle 2.8 liter VR6 into the nose of their 2-door coupe it became more of a reality. Though on paper it didn’t have much more power, the VR6 was better suited to the design and weight of the Corrado. Zero to 60 plummeted nearly a second and top speed went up to a then-impressive 137 mph. But it was the all-around flexibility of the motor that proved the winner; torquey at low revs yet happy to head towards the redline, the Corrado finally fulfilled the promise of being a budget P-car.
Unfortunately, there was a price to pay. The base price for a Corrado in 1992 was nearly $22,000. Add a few options in and you were paying more than you did for a Porsche 924S four years earlier. To put it into even more stark perspective, the base price of a much quicker, nicer, more efficient, better cornering, better braking, more technologically impressive, and significantly safer GTI today is only $32,000 some 32 years later; correct for inflation, and you understand how expensive these hot hatches were. As a result, Corrados and especially the SLC have always held a cult status and higher residual value than the rest of the lineup. Today’s market loves them, as well.
This one has some light, but in my eye not beneficial, mods. 20K seems like all the money as a result. For example, BaT had a similar one with (arguably) much better mods sell for $18k recent. Maybe there is room for negotiation?
The B4 Cabriolet is also another car I’ve always loved. Saying that you like the Audi Cabriolet is like saying you thought Jar Jar Binks was the best-developed character in the Star Wars pre-boot.
Put aside the typical top-down motoring bias and stereotype. There were more reasons to single out the Cabriolet. They were soft. They came to the U.S. in automatic only. They were powered here exclusively by the yawn-a-minute 2.8 V6. Inherently it’s not a bad motor, and it had more punch than the inline-5s did (barely). But inspired it’s not. And to top it all off? Perhaps that could have been remedied if they were available with quattro, right? No, FrontTrak only. That was Audi’s lame attempt to make the basic front-drivers sound like they had some cool system. Nope, this was a one-wheel-drive wonder. So that’s lame-on-lame action when you’re considering an Audi.
So this is Rocky V, or The Sum of All Fears, or that horrible ninth season of the X-Files. But I have a guilty pleasure. No, I still haven’t watched “X-hibit C” above because why on Earth would I do that? But I do really like the Audi Cabriolet. I can logically admit its many shortcomings, and yet every time I see one I’m drawn to the shape. To me, it’s just a pretty car, even if I can’t fully describe why it’s a pretty car. Even when the ad is lazy, the pictures are horrible, and the car has obvious needs…I…am…drawn….to…..click……
This late-model example benefits from some of the sport equipment, like the Votex 16″ wheels and three-spoke steering wheel. Both dressed up the basic formula. Yes, it’ll need work. But hey, it’s also only $3,900!
Which bad decision would you make?
-Carter