modern classics 49f Yorkshire is God’s Own County, then the
moorland roads between Manchester and
Huddersfield are His Holy Test Track. In the
1920s a young tearaway named David Brown
used to race motorbikes and his own homebuilt special
cars on these roads. He went on to buy Aston Martin and
create the legendary DB-series. In more recent times,
before it was confined to Wales, the Lombard R AC Rally
ran through these parts, the windswept moorland echoing
to the sound of Group B monsters scattering stinging
gravel and firing long, fat f lames into the night.
There’s fast f lowing tarmac up here on the Woodhead
Pass. There’s slippery, frozen asphalt on the fir-shadowed
apexes of the A6024. Beneath the lunar-looking Holme
Moss Transmitter Station the going gets serious: it’s
rutted and uneven. Perfect territory, then, for the Audi TT
Quattro Sport, one of just 800 built, to prove its worth.
With the pressure of the Quattro rallying dynasty bearing
down on its Bauhaus-curved shoulders, it promises grip
aplenty in a compact, nimble wheel-at-each-corner
package. And it’s a coupé too, which is just as well,
because it’s bloody freezing up here...
Two distinctly old-school sounds pierce the early
spring-morning quiet of suburban South Manchester. The
first is one of those trusty T-shaped plastic ice-scrapers
chiselling its way across a windscreen, and the second is
the barely-silenced boom and crackle of a high-
performance turbocharged four-cylinder. No whispering
fuel saver this, but rather the kind of whirling, scudding
turbine that catapulted Porsche 911s and Lotus Esprits
into the supercar league and rally cars sideways through
forests. It’s a deep baritone tearing noise that means blunt,
punchy business. I’m more worried about being able to see
out of the windscreen than waking up the locals, but I bet a