There is little doubt among the rally fans that the most ferocious looking beast of the Group B era was the Audi Quattro S1. The car went through several evolutions and overcoming the 2 wheel drive Lancia Rally 037 threat, it had practically no opposition until mid 1984 when they met their first real challenger, the Peugeot 205 T16, in the hands of Ari Vatanen. 5 consecutive wins for Vatanen meant that Audi had to evolve and was forced to introduce the Sport Quattro with reduced wheelbase to cope better with the twisty stages. But Peugeot quickly had their answer in the form of the 205 T16 Evo2 with its improved engine and aerodynamics. Shortly after, Audi introduced the final evolution of the Quattro, the S1. The car looked spectacular with its fierce front spoilers, wheel arches and rear wings. Somewhat like a Group C circuit racecar of that era. It took it's maiden victory in the hands of Hannu Mikkola in the 1985 Olympus rally which was not official WRC rally yet. On its first official outing in Argentina, Blomquist was in the lead until he retired with engine problems. On the 1000 Lakes rally in Finland the car performed really well but Salonen managed to clinch the victory from them. That was probably the moment when Walter Rohrl had enough of the Peugeots and traveled to Italy for a two weeks pre-event test which prooved to be essential. The rest is history, he defeated the Peugeots and the old, outdated Lancia 037s in a spectacular manner and achieved the first and ultimately the last WRC victory for the Audi Quattro S1 in San Remo. Unfortunately for the Audi team, the next events, the RAC Rally and Monte Carlo signed the rise of a new era they couldn't match any more, the Lancia Delta S4 and Henri Toivonen, respectively. Although Rohrl and Mikkola still showed strong potential on the Monte, they could only finish 3rd and 4th. Sadly, after the terrible accident on the 1986 Portugal rally, Audi quit rallying in Group B. There is an excellent video from the San Remo rally on the net which is a must to watch forevery Audi and Group B fan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4K6r4CjchI
The plastic kit of the Audi Quattro S1 was probably one of the most awaited one, after several expensive and inaccurate resin kits. The body looks very good and well detailed, they addressed well the critical front windshield angle issue. Overall, it is pretty good kit although few things needs to be mentioned. First, a nice surprise, the styrene is accurately thinned down at the wheel openings giving a realistic appearence to the model. The see through
front grill is really a nice touch and will show through the engine details if someone builds it. Few unpleasant surprise though, you need to be well equiped with white primer since most of the major parts like chassis, interior tub and door panels - for some uncomprehensible reason are molded in black. Some other issue, apart from the flash on many parts (quality still far from Tamiya or Hasegawa), is the thickness and the quality of the photoetch. Their
Toyota TA64, I built recently, had a superb photoetching with thin and accurate grills but this Audi has a thicker, hard to bend, thick steel etching with unusable grills. Beemax went in the bad direction with that.
The Sanremo rally was run almost entirely on gravel stages so I will use the excellent gravel rim set from RESCUE MODELS. The cast-on details on the rims are really fantastic, they have all the tiny texts accurately reproduced on the spokes! I've seen few aftermarket gravel wheels for this Audi but this is by far the best set! Highly recommended!
I started the build with the chassis by removing some cast-on parts like footrests and cables and reworked the foot-well area with some styrene. The dashboard looks really good and superbly detailed. Too bad that it is not for this car but for the previous versions. It is difficult to find good reference of the '85 San Remo car's dashboard because the car was scrapped by Audi. I found only two images from that rally and it shows a different dash configuration. So I modified it to get closer to the original look. I also reworked the gearshift and added some more details to it. I cut some parts out from the rollcage to represent the foam padding with a 2.5mm styrene rod. Also used the same rod to make the cooling tubes on the co-driver side. The car had a rear mounted radiator for better weight distribution and these tubes connected them to the engine. I scratched a bit more detailed handbrake. I also closed the gaps between the wheelarches and the chassis as To-mek pointed
out in his great build.
