Audi Sport Quattro

The long version

The standard Ur-Quattro was already winning rallies, but Audi's engineers wanted a shorter car for faster direction changes on tight stages, so they cut 320mm out of the wheelbase, fitted a new 20-valve version of the turbocharged inline-five, and built much of the body in Kevlar and carbon-fiber composites to keep weight in check despite the extra bracing a shorter wheelbase demanded. The result cost over DM 200,000 in period — more than a Countach — for a car most buyers would never take anywhere near its rally-stage limits. Prices sat flat for years while people who wanted an old Audi bought a regular Ur-Quattro instead, then took off hard once the wider market connected the Sport Quattro's rarity and homologation pedigree to the broader Group B boom; a car worth under $500,000 a decade ago now regularly clears $700,000, and the works S1 E2 competition cars it enabled sell for multiples of that. It still gets driven more than the mid-engine Italian and French Group B cars in this batch, since AWD makes it dramatically more forgiving in the wet — but at this price, more capable than the others still just means trailered slightly less often.