This Film Tells The Incredible Story Of Audi Sport’s Iconic Inline-Five
The sound of an Audi Quattro S1 reverberates and echoes complexly in the forests of yesteryear Europe, the inline-five’s distinctive song framed by staccato backfires, chirping waste gates, and the pings of gravel being churned into wheel wells. A few years later and a few thousand miles away, we find the quintet of compression is again a dominant force in motorsport, with the Audi 200 Trans-Am conquering the American racing series from which the car takes its name.
The story of Audi’s inline-fives begins well before these competitive achievements though, and its development marked a turning point in the company as a whole during the 1970s. It was the beginning of a legacy of unique automobiles that have seen the engine architecture powering everything from luxury sedans to two-seaters to turbocharged Avants, and it has become as linked with the brand’s identity as Quattro.
The provenance of Audi’s five-cylinder engines is deeply embedded on the world’s race tracks and roadways, and to celebrate their engineering innovation in its varied forms over the decades, Audi USA has gathered significant cars, engineers, racing drivers, and just about everyone else who played a significant role in the rise of inline-five for a terrifically enjoyable recounting of the origin story and the ensuing evolution.
