Well played Audi!

Spotted this multi-coloured A1 in Ellesmere Port Audi, styled to evoke the racing livery of the 80's Quattro rally cars. Yeah it's probably just a dealer add-on sticker scheme designed to help shift the new baby A1 to the same market who buy Minis with union-jack roofs, but to a true Audi-phile it's much more than that. It's a head nod at last to the sporting heritage of the marque, something it would not be near where it is today without and something that Audi seems to have forgotten as a brand in recent years as it has tried hard to corner the 'bountyful chav' market previously dominated by the likes of Vauxhall's Calibra and, of course, the BMW 3 Series. From all the experiences I've had with Audi garages in the last 5 years, I get a distinct feeling that they don't want a discerning motorist to believe in every aspect of their brand any more, by showing how the evolution of their ideas have transferred into their products or affected their success on the track, and instead just want to dazzle you with strip-running-lights and MP3 connectivity.

The former marketing ethos used to be the mainstay of Audi and even Honda are now taking this tack with their "Everything we do goes into everything we do" ad-campaign as times grow harder. Have core Audi buyers really changed so dramatically? Have the 80 and A4 drivers of the late 20th century started to shun the over-stylized contemporary models and jump into Honda Accords? Does Audi seem bothered by this? In a word no, because I guess it's finally got where it really wanted to be - salivated over by schoolboys and climbed out of by wags.

I saw this change happening to Audi at the turn of the millennium when TT mania really took hold and lived on into the last decade through the RS4 and RS6, proving Audi were now ready to take on BMWs M3, whose younger fans started to give Audi the mainstream street-credibility it deserved and, shamelessly, the brand aimed itself at them with blinkers on. By the time the likes of the Q7 and R8 arrived, it was clear that Audi couldn't be any further removed from its far more conscientious methods of a decade before. Could this new A1 colour-scheme be the brainchild of an Audi designer who feels the brand has lost its roots?