Modern classic: Audi TT

If you were pressed to name the automotive design icon of the 1990s, there wouldn’t be a glut of standout contenders. Compared to the two decades that bookended it, the Nineties was a time of transition, many manufacturers struggling to establish an aesthetic marker. If there was a theme for the vast majority of 1990s designs, it would probably be ‘bloat’. Cars generally became bigger, heavier and more complex. This was the era of twin-turbos, four-wheel steering, fledgling active aero and the dawn of the SUV. Meeting the forthcoming EuroNCAP crash regulations also added weight to vehicles with features such as airbags, extended deformable structures, side impact protection and pillar reinforcement. Body styling became heavier-handed as a result.

This gradual drift towards obesity only highlighted in starker relief those manufacturers striving to develop simple, clean designs that would stand the test of time in a fast-changing automotive landscape. The Audi TT stands as possibly the deftest, most original piece of styling of that generation. In an era awash with shamelessly retro throwbacks, the TT was something different. It paid tributes to Audi’s heritage without ever lapsing into pastiche.

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The TT came from the fecund imagination of Freeman Thomas. The alumnus of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena had enjoyed the largesse of Ford to fund his education, but upon graduating, Thomas turned his back on a position with Ford and hopped the Atlantic to take up a position with Porsche instead. After three years with Porsche, Thomas found himself back in the US, freelancing for J Mays – the chief designer at the Volkswagen Design Center in Simi Valley, California – on the Concept One, the car that would become the New Beetle.

Thomas joined Audi in 1991, initially under Peter Schreyer, with Mays becoming Audi’s global design director in 1993. Back in 1991, Mays and Martin Smith had styled the striking Audi Avus quattro concept car that was to act as the centrepiece of the show stand at the Tokyo Motor Show. Many of the styling influences of that concept would find their way into the TT project. The clean arc of the roofline, the shape of the headlamps, the wheelarch treatment, the grille concept; even the unashamed hero treatment of shut lines and sills can be traced through a certain evolutionary arc. The engine, a mock-up made of wood, was thankfully not carried over.

The Avus wasn’t the only Audi concept revealed that year. There was also the clean shape of the Quattro Spyder, designed by Erwin Himmel, which found no favour with Louisa Piech, the largest shareholder of Porsche. “Don’t build that car,” she told her son, then-Audi boss Ferdinand Piech, realising that it was too close to Porsche’s Boxster in philosophy and was set to be steamrollered as a result. Ferdinand, a man who advice usually bounced off like airgun pellets off a Panzer, wisely listened to mum’s word.

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Perhaps an asymmetric attack was the way to go. While on a business trip with Mays in 1994, Thomas created a series of sketches riffing on the Avus. They depicted a bluff , foursquare coupe with marked shoulders and an almost breathtaking geometric boldness of line. When Mays saw the thumbnails, he asked if he could borrow what Thomas casually dismissed as a “little doodle” and took them straight to Franz-Josef Paefgen, Audi’s then head of development who realised that here was a coupe that could break the aesthetic legacy of the ur-quattro – a design language with a very long shadow within the halls at Ingolstadt.

Thus began the skunkworks genesis of the Audi TT. Thomas worked in the evenings, refining the shape of the coupe, as an adjunct to his day job. Eventually he cajoled Mays to squeak out the resources for some clay modellers to build a quarter-scale buck. Throughout the process, Thomas understood that the key to getting the TT project green-lit for production was not just the impact of its shape, but also the ease that it could be productionised which, at the time, meant that it had to almost seamlessly sit onto the chassis of the VW Group A4 platform, the underpinnings of the Mk4 Golf as well as the original Audi A3.

Paefgen was canny enough to realise that by basing the TT on such proletarian roots, it would appear no threat to Porsche. When Piech was shown the concept, he was delighted. This was exactly the sort of thing he loved: a design statement but one with an engineering story that made sense, and a pragmatic sharing of componentry.

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“Everybody will have roadsters at the Frankfurt Show,” said Piech, knowing that the Mercedes-Benz SLK and the BMW Z3 would appear at the 1995 Frankfurt Show. “I want a coupe; this coupe,” he reiterated. The soft-top version of the TT would be held over until the Tokyo Show.

“We used the quarter-scale model to solve production problems; to give us answers,” said Thomas. “If you like, to learn the rules before we broke them. Each detail had a rationale, not just economic but also emotional.”

“It’s the evolution of an idea I’ve had for a long time. I think there are others like me who will enjoy the car. I really believe in the maturity and intellect of the TT. There haven’t been any research clinics. This isn’t a marketing car like the Z3.”

Romanian-born Romulus Rost was put in charge of the cabin. “I wanted to make an interior for a basic sports car,” he claimed. “No gimmicks, only the things you really need from a sports car. I didn’t want to play with lots of forms. It was important that the interior be part of the car – simple, clean and not just a detail.”

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The TT Concept that appeared on the Frankfurt Show stand was close to the production car, the key difference being the massaging away of the bulky C-pillars in favour of a more elegant glasshouse with rear side windows that didn’t distract so much from the roof line. Torsten Wenzel was part of the exterior design team, noting that: “the greatest satisfaction was when the trade press noticed that from the prototype to the final model, the styling had remained virtually unchanged, even though, of course, we had to adapt many of the details to the technical specifications of the final version, including the proportions.”

It would take fully four years before the keys to a production Audi TT arrived here at Wheels. John Carey was the man responsible for the drive feature in a 132kW front-wheel-drive coupe, priced at $73K. It’s often said that the TT gets the rough end of the stick from many enthusiast publications because, after all, it’s just a Golf GTI in a prettier body. But when the Golf GTI in question is the unremarkable Mk4, it’s perhaps understandable why Carey was lukewarm in his dynamic assessment. While he loved the car’s aesthetics, the TT’s steering, power delivery, traction and ride quality all came under his withering gaze. There was one line, almost a throwaway near the tail end of the piece, that foreshadowed what was to come, noting “a decline in directional stability.”

At much the same time, I was driving an early production TT in south London. To this day it’s probably the new car that has attracted the most public attention, and that includes any number of exotica. It looked like nothing else on the road and people loved it. This was the 165kW quattro variant and it delivered enough straight-line speed and excitement to mask a few of its dynamic shortcomings.

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Those issues came to light in a series of high-speed accidents, mainly in Germany, with cars travelling at over 180km/h. Abrupt manoeuvres would often send the vehicles into unrecoverable spins, and Audi issued a recall in late 1999 in order to effect some remedial changes to the front control arms and bushings, to fit a rear spoiler that helped quell lift, and to install an electronic stability control system as standard.

You might well have suspected as much, but the original front control arms are now in serious demand from a certain cohort of TT enthusiasts who prefer the handling bias of the car without quite so much understeer built into it. Indeed there are some companies who can now retrofit a replica of the original front suspension, should you wish to own a TT that’s a little more immersive in its handling. I didn’t find anything too terrifying about the original, but then I didn’t spend too much time perambulating about above 180km/h in it. I attended the launch of the TT Roadster at the Goodwood hillclimb, only to watch three cars drive into the trees at the first corner. But that was probably more attributable to the ineptitude of overexcited motoring journalists than any significant shortcoming with the car.

The closest Audi got to building a true enthusiast TT Mk1 was not the 3.2-litre VR6 version, the first Audi to feature a dual-clutch transmission, but instead the stripped-out 1.8T quattro Sport model (dubbed Club Sport in mainland European markets), launched in 2005. This was a true gem, but unfortunately it never made its way down under.

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Some 1165 examples were built, with fully 800 in right-hand drive. Built by quattro GmbH, it packed 177kW and 320Nm which, coupled with a 75kg weight reduction, meant that the sprint to 100km/h dipped below six seconds. Out went the spare wheel, the rear bench seat, a rear harmonic damper and the rear parcel shelf. Air conditioning slid onto the options list. The 12-volt battery was relocated to the rear of the car for superior weight distribution, it featured stiffer suspension and was treated to a rear strut brace, an Alcantara-trimmed steering wheel and a set of optional Recaro Pole Positions. No, it was never quite Cayman-sharp, but it was still a very enjoyable and special-feeling coupe.

But then a simple 8N TT quattro coupe in silver, much like the car we photographed here, feels more like the definitive item. This is the car that everyone thinks of when they envision the TT, the car that came to life from Freeman Thomas’s sketchpad.

By today’s standards, it’s pared-back simple. The 1.8-litre turbo four drives the Haldex all-wheel-drive system. Its underpinnings pre-dated the Golf V and its all-new, Ford Focus-inspired multi-link rear suspension, meaning front-drive Mk1s get a rudimentary torsion beam, while the quattro features a relatively simple independent rear end with trailing arms and a pair of lateral links on either side.

While the TT undoubtedly became a better driver’s car as it progressed from the initial 8N version (1998-2006) through the 8J (2006-2014) and on to its final FV/8S guise (2014-2023), neither of the latter iterations ever came close to the impact of the original. Was it a game changer? Probably not. It never propelled Audi into a new sphere of desirability the way the ur-quattro did. But it remains a design icon and one of the most instantly recognisable cars of the Nineties. These cars will one day be worth strong money. Get hold of one before everybody catches onto that fact.

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Audi TT Quattro 8N Specs

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