We’ll admit it, we walked up on the car you see here with a bit of consternation. This B5 A4, an actual Audi Sport touring car chassis, was on display at Waterfest. Then owned by Neuspeed, the car had just competed as the only entry in the “unlimited class” of European Car’s 1.8T challenge. This was years ago, and we were wishing it were ours… because it very well could have been.
The story goes back even further to a New York Auto Show luncheon at Tavern on the Green in Manhattan. Then active Champion Racing was displaying their then in-competition R8 LMP1 cars as part of an Audi event. Chatting up one of the then team members, he’d mentioned he’d imported an A4 touring car into the USA. We almost didn’t believe him.
The story, as it was told to us, is that this was the second chassis built by Audi Sport. The first chassis had given up its life in FIA crash testing and as such it was chronologically the oldest existing example. It was also said to have been the Brad Jones Australian Touring Car Championship winner in 1996 when Audi swept touring car series around the world. It had a fair history to it.
Back then, the Champion Racing team member who brought it over had it sitting in his garage in a cul de sac in Michigan and what he wanted for it was not an insurmountable sum. I was young and had just bought my first house, and scrambled desperately to come up with a boondoggle of a plan to get a friend to go half and half on it with the theory that we’d rent it out to dealerships for display. The plan never happened and I lost track of the car.
Then, I was at Waterfest, and there it was. Turns out Neuspeed had bought it mainly to enter the 1.8T challenge as I remember. They’d modified it, which seemed a bit tragic given the car’s history, and competed. Since it was an Audi Sport chassis with sequential motorsport gearbox and really not in comparison to any 1.8T fielded by anther competing tuner, European Car created a class for it so it could show.
After the show, then contributing photographer Jimmy Sykes was able to get some time with the car and shoot it for a feature. Alas, we never were able to get this one written up for a variety of reasons, but we wanted to finally share it just the same.
We hear this car was sold to another owner and ended up in the Bahamas where it can still be seen racing, but that’s about all we know. If you want to learn more about the Neuspeed ownership, we’ve found it posted on Super Street Magazine’s website HERE.
Check out more photos of this car in our photo gallery archive linked the usual places below and also to the right of this story.
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