Description
Audi withdrew from the World Rally Championship in 1986, but the company wasn't quite finished with motorsport events yet, as the following year's Pikes Peak Hill Climb would show, when Walter Röhrl and his Audi Sport quattro S1 not only won, but broke records.
By 1987, Röhrl and Audi had enjoyed a very fruitful relationship. World champion of 1980 and 1982, Röhrl had joined the Ingolstadt team in 1984, at a time when the brand with the four rings dominated the entire rallying scene. The quattro permanent four-wheel drive system left its rear-wheel drive competitors in the dust and a mere two years after first testing the Audi quattro at the end of 1980, Audi had already clinched the manufacturers' world title. Hannu Mikkola won the drivers' world championship in 1983, and in the following year Audi took both titles, with Stig Blomqvist from Sweden topping the drivers' rankings.
From 1984 Audi's rivals - Peugeot, Lancia, MG and Ford - also switched to four-wheel drive to compete against the brand's new racing car, the Sport quattro, whose wheelbase had been reduced to 222 centimetres. The regulations of what was then Group B imposed few restrictions in terms of technology; the fierce competition resulted in engines which generated some 500 bhp. Beyond rallying, however, Audi entered the world's best-known hill-climb race for the first time in 1984 - the "Race to the Clouds" on Pikes Peak in Colorado.
Standing some 4,301 metres high, Pikes Peak is in the Rocky Mountains and is named after the explorer Zebulon Montgomery Pike, who charted it by order of the US army. The first race took place in 1916, and continued thereafter on a regular basis, usually taking place on July 4th, American Independence Day. At the start of the 1980s the organisers introduced a category for rallying cars - an ideal stage to showcase high-tech designs like the Sport quattro.
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