5000CDQturbo

I just wanted to share this with you Audi V8 guys, thanks to Bastian for going to extraordinary lengths to write a book. cheers superdave

Dear fans of the Audi V8, as most of you may know, I'm driving V8s since more than 10 years and thoseunderdogs became my number one leisure activity in no time. Some of you may havealso noticed my affection to posting long answers - yes, I love writing! Someyears ago, blessed with too much spare time (even though I have to maintainthree of those tanks), I turned one of my long-term daydreams into reality. Istarted writing a book about the Audi V8 D1. First steps were easy: I grabbed together everything I was able to get hold of(thanks to you guys for supporting me with the one or other scan of old stuff!),stacked up multiple piles of V8 literature (next to the ones I had alraedycollected in the past), bought several pounds of old car magazines and indexedall the material. After making a plan how a book about a car with that kind of amany-sided history would have to be structured and after extracting theessential information from all those different sources, I started to write thebook chapter for chapter right away. I had in mind that the time will come that I'd have to get in touch with Audifor several reasons, but I didn't want to show up with big plans butempty-handed - you know that kind of people, a lot of talking but no actions.That wasn't the outward impression I wanted do create, so I really wanted tohave a first verison of the manuscript ready before I wrote my first letter tothose guys in Ingolstadt. Reasons are manifold why I wanted to have Audi Tradition with me with thatproject - first of all, access to information. Yes, you can buy a surprisinglylarge amount of literature online, but there's still a lot of data which neverfound its way outside the archives. And I simply had the claim to have it all inthe book - everything there is to know about the D1(1), not least 'cause that'swhat I often miss in books of that kind. And not only written information isvaluable, the memories of contemporary witnesses are even more interesting. Andlast but not least, I had no photographic usage rights, not for a single image(except for the ones I've made myself now and then - not the right stuff forserious publication). So I chose the naive way and wrote to Audi Tradition, roughly describing what Iwas after and what kind of support I'd hope to get from them. To my honetsurprise I was invited to visit the archive of Audi Tradition shortly after thatin order to research for whatever I could need under supervision. That happenedin spring of 2011, one year after I'd started to work on the project. To tellthe thruth I drove to Ingolstadt with the goal of gathering as much informationand images together as I was able to, being sure that this would stay my one andonly chance to enter the hallowed halls of Audi Tradtion - but it turned outdifferently. Apparantly I was really lucky as, most important, nobody else inside or outsideAudi was (officially) working on a book about the Audi V8, so there was noconflict of interest with anybody else. Additionally, Audi itself was prettycurious about the whole story of the V8. And last but not least a monographicbook about the D1 fitted good into their publication plans and would be perfectfor the 25 year premium class celebration in 2013. As you can see, it didn'twork out for 2013 for several reasons, but better late than never. I wouldn't say that everything was straight forward from that day on and that itwas a cake walk to bring that project to a good ending, but it was definetelythe most joyful and exciting challenge I'd ever accepted. It was still myproject, so whatever I wanted to achieve was still up to myself to accomplish,even though I now had official Audi support, so in case of anybody being indoubt of the reliability of the project, Audi was there to back it up. And thatwas good for the really thrilling part, namely getting in touch with all theguys who had their hands on the V8 back in the early and late 80's and early90's. Starting with the names I got from the publications I'd studied earlier (thereis a really good one from SAE in English, for example), I worked myself from oneperson to the next, meeting several of those people personally, some of themalready retired, others not working for Audi any more since ages, and some whohave climbed up the career leather in the meanwhile, having been CTO or CEO fora while. Pretty much everybody had a lot of stories to tell and some names uptheir sleeves who I could contact as well. At a certain point I had recorded personal memories for virtually every topic Icould think of regarding the V8, like the development, motor sport achievements,tech stuff, marketing, strategic decisions, and dozens of other subjects. So itwas time to weave everything together and to finalize what was up to become thebook you will be able to buy in a few days from now. Audi, in the meantime,helped me to find a publisher for the book, and not very surprisingly, but to myvery pleasure, they chose their regular publisher, namely Delius Klasing. Theytook care of the book's layout and typesetting and how all that stuff can fitinto less than 200 pages while I was hunting down the last images I was verykeen on having in the final book. And after more than four years of continuous work, spending numerous days off inGermany and Austria meeting former employees and collecting material, the bookis now finally on the brink of being launched. Unfortunately, it has - for nowat least - one major handicap for you guys, as it is only published in German.As more than half of the V8s were sold to countries not speaking German, itwould absolutely make sense to have it published in English too, but thepublisher is for safety first. Without having any kind of promises neither fromAudi nor the publisher, I could imagine that an English version is in scope ifthe German version is sold above expectations. The book can be ordered online already with several traders, a sneak preview canbe downloaded on the publisher's site: http://www.delius-klasing.de/buecher...di%20V8_LP.pdf) Maybe the one or the other connives at the language barrier and enjoys the first(official) book dealing with our love-hated underdogs - in worst case, it's agreat picture book with images you've certainly never seen before :-) Have fun Bastian