This past weekend, thanks in no small part to the atrocious weather pattern that seems to be sitting over my head in New England, I missed an opportunity to head to Warner Lake in New York and do some ice driving. While my participation in these events has generally involved instructing students and having a lot of sideways fun, the Audi events I attend are usually run in conjunction with a ice racing organization. If you think Audi quattros are top dog, then you need to see the heavily modified sprint cars on studs running around the ice. They put anything you could drive on the road to shame. But presuming you actually did want to drive there, older Audis are still pretty attractive options to have an ice racing car. First off, they’re good on the ice – especially the older generation cars with less electronic interference. Secondly, they’re generally pretty cheap and mostly reliable. Along with older Subarus, they seem to make up the brunt of cars that head to the ice. Of course, finding a decent older Audi quattro these days isn’t always easy. One possible solution is to look towards the glut of cheap A4s that litter these shores.
I was recently having a discussion about this with my cousin. We both owned 4000 quattros as our first cars, and both are nostalgic about having one, but coming by a decent one can be difficult and the reality is that they’re pretty slow out of the box. The A4, in comparison, isn’t much quicker out of the gates thanks to a heavier chassis; but unlike the B2 they’re plentiful, parts are easy to come by, and select one with the 1.8T motor and you can turn the wick up quite a bit. Plus, near us there’s an A4 for sale every day of the week for less than $2,000 – most of them in pretty reasonable shape, amazingly. But instead of building an ice race car yourself, maybe it’s easier to just buy one that someone else has already built:
