A combination of style, ‘coolness’, driving pleasure and sheer personal preference. If you have a better list or just one model you want to add the list, let me know.

The top four cars are pretty much inter-changeable all of them could have got first place. It would depend upon the day, the journey I had to make and . . . . . well lots of things. In this case, it might be that the weather was bad or it was raining.

Audi ur-Quattro.

The cold, wet forests or Keilder and North Yorkshire, bright lights lancing through the trees behind you as you desperately ran along the gravel track to the next ‘even better’ vantage point. Somewhere else to get showered with grit at 2am in the morning.

Another popping, fire breathing, rally car that ended up arriving in the retailer showrooms in the 1980’s. Pick 10 valve or 20 valve performance, in road trim there was little difference between them – although the 20v seemed to rev harder. It had a 2.1litre turbo charged 5 cylinder engine. Even the talking dashboard version was cool, even if most owners did turn the feature off.

Starting life as a military 4 wheel drive system, shoe horned into a pretty Audi coupe, the gearbox also had locking differentials, so you could turn the car into a virtual tractor if you needed to.

Once I got my driving licence, I only wanted two cars. The Porsche 911, already covered here, and the Audi Quattro (in red or grey). Neither, I could afford at the time.

Audi did have a 2.2 litre un-turbocharged coupe, using the same engine and body. It was slate grey, It wasn’t the real thing, but it was close. So I had one of those instead.

But the proper version, it had useable performance, almost available to ’every man’, that was more focused on the 50mph to 130mph window. It remains the second fastest – cross country – real world car I ever drove (after the Lancia Delta Integrale, but that was way too unreliable and rust prone to appear here unfortunately).

The list is the personal preference of our Director, Guy Winter. A car fanatic since the 1960’s, he eats’, sleeps and dreams everything Motor Trade. For the past 25 years he has worked for Cymark providing digital and telephone marketing support for individual retailers, groups and manufacturers alike.

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