Features
Shell shocked
The iconic TT has had a makeover... not that you can tell from the outside. Underneath, though, it's a different story
Here we deal with the engineering behind the new Audi TT, but you can find out what it's like to drive by reading our road test.
The original TT was a bit of a calendar car, a pin-up that turned out just a bit empty-headed. A joy to own, great to use and easy to drive, thanks to torquey engines and Quattro security. But not, at the core, a sports car. It drove much like all those other Mk IV Golf clones. But how well its looks served it.
For a start they helped it overcome an early food scare-type panic. Aerodynamic dysfunction seemed to be causing them to spin at high speed, until a recall added a spoiler and took the edge off the suspension. Yet the looks held the day and it was a runaway success, especially here in Britain.
And not just at the start. Fashion coupes are usually just that - fads that quickly get stale. But the TT didn't. It just kept on selling and selling, because there was much more to the looks than simply being good-looking. Somehow, this car locked itself into our neural networks. It fitted our associations.
'The original TT was a bit of a calendar car, a pin-up that turned out just a bit empty-headed'
It was small and squat and fit-looking. Its simplicity implied an absolute lack of pretence - you trusted it to be a no-nonsense driving machine (even if it actually wasn't). The geometry of the surfaces and the shallow windows made it look tough, and sure enough it felt tough, thanks to its unbeatably crafted interior and the well-damped weight to its controls.
The angles around that fastback sparked almost subconscious associations with rabid German racers from at least 50 years back. There were echoes of Bauhaus and Futurism in there. The new generation of Audi designers dismiss it as 'toy-like' but it was actually a highly sophisticated shape.
Audi tinkers with all that at its peril. But at the same time you can't just clone a car. Things move on. And if the old TT so clearly became the brand's design icon, then, if the brand's design has changed, the TT must change with it.
So it has, and if you look at what happened to the previous A6 when it switched to the current model, you could have predicted a lot of what happened to the TT. That previous A6 was, of course, the car closest in Audi's design timeline to the first TT, and also a remarkably extreme expression of the company's mid-Nineties design language.
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