Frankly, I was not a fan of Audi. To me, they seemed like heavy, expensive and sluggish representatives of the sport-sedan market. For sure, they were sumptuously appointed road cars, with a bend more toward luxury than performance. The tuner companies that catered to these cars seemed to offer products that, like penis enhancing pills, were mostly designed to impress others visually, not to make power or improve speed. Since my taste leans more toward EVO than pimp palace, Audis were not my sort of ride. Something not related to mellowing with age has changed my mind as of late. It took one Audi in particular to erase my prejudice and make me a believer. It started with an incident one day at Willow Springs Raceway.
Before that fateful day, my experiences in the track event and time trial world deepened my prejudice toward Audis being more cruisers and profile cars than their Teutonic brethren from BMW. I had never seen an Audi that could turn a respectable lap time among the few whose owners dared venture to the track in the first place.
One of my friends purchased a 1.8T A4 Quattro and proudly declared very publicly that his bercar, full of expensive boutique go-fast bits, could beat any vehicle I could build "in any contest of speed." This ended after his first and only track day when I beat his best lap time by over two seconds driving a nearly-stock Japanese shitbox on rock-hard all-weather tires. "In any contest of speed" became a battle cry of the cheap and the phrase has actually appeared in the pages of this magazine many times, as an inside joke of our editors.
Fast forward a few years to the present: I am driving a very fast SE-R Cup racecar in a NASA time trial event at Willow Springs, when I catch sight of a rapidly approaching black object in my rear view mirror. This is unusual because not too many street-based cars can close on a true racecar very rapidly if at all. I choose to ignore my mirror and concentrate on the track ahead. Two turns later, a black blur flies by on the outside of a fast sweeper and I am amazed to see the familiar 4-circle Audi emblem affixed to the rear decklid as it rapidly disappears in the distance.
Back in the pits, I checked the car out, expecting to find a replica of Randy Pobst's Speed world Challenge car. I was surprised to find instead a well-appointed streetcar, or perhaps a really trick racecar disguised as one. Thusly I was introduced to Pat Lindsey's awesome, perception altering Audi B5 S4.
Pat didn't intend to race his S4; it was purchased used in March of 2004. As a successful stockbroker, Pat splits his time between the East and West Coasts and was in the need of a driver to keep in New York, his East Coast base of operations. Unfortunately, the car was stolen from NYC's mean streets and stripped within hours of its arrival at its new home. The next day, the car was recovered across the Hudson in not quite the same shape that it had been in.