1998 Audi A4

The '98 Audi is an awesome car for many reasons. I like it primarily for the flush-mounted door handles. It seems, however, that most people like the car not only for its door handles, but because it was the second year Audi offered the 1.8T in the A4. I suppose that's a legitimate reason to like the car, too.

Why is the second year the engine was offered a good one, you may be asking? If you've hung around the automotive world for any amount of time, you'll know that the first year of any car or engine is always problematic. No matter who the manufacturer is, if the engine is an untested commodity, it's bound to have some growing pains.

As far as the Audi moniker was concerned in the '90s, the company was fighting its way back from the very unfavorable image it had earned in the '80s. Who would want to buy a car from a hurting company with an unproven, turbocharged engine? The smart ones waited until 1998 to pick up their 1.8T A4s.

These are all interesting facts, but none of these played a role in Jimmy Kao's decision to purchase this '98 A4 1.8T. The determining factor behind this purchase was radio-controlled cars. In 1996, Jimmy won a national championship racing an all-wheel-drive r/c car, and it was the handling prowess of the little 11/410scale car that made Jimmy realize the capabilities of the Audi quattro. This Audi was purchased in late 1997, and within three years, the car was completely transformed into a killer sedan.

If a 1.8T has a K04 turbo swap, that normally belittles anything else bolted to the car, but not in this case. Although the Matrix Engineering turbo upgrade, GIAC chip, Evolution

Motorsport front-mount intercooler, Ignition Solutions plasma coils, and various other air- and fuel-routing devices were installed-and the car goes like one very pissed off bat out of hell-what interested me the most about Jimmy's ride was the electronics. I have never rated an entertainment system higher than a turbo swap; as soon as I've seen the swapped turbo, the rest of the car has always become highly insignificant. Why shouldn't it, especially in a quattro? Quattros were designed to push the limits of physics, and K04-powered 1.8Ts in quattros took that ideology to the extreme. I'm all for throwing physics back in its own face. But the electronics in Jimmy's A4 were a little more interesting than most.

The stereo mods started out modestly with trunk-mounted, Plexiglas-enclosed, Rockford Fosgate amps and Eclipse woofers. Inside the car, Jimmy mounted a 7-inch Panasonic wide-screen monitor near a Panasonic DVD player and Dolby Digital DTS decoder, and just to the right of those is the interesting part-a custom-built personal computer with a wireless keyboard and high-speed wireless LAN that's hooked into Jimmy's home network. The computer is wired to utilize the Panasonic monitor as an interface, and the LAN enables the computer to easily download MPEGs, MP3s, and even directions from the Web before a long trip. It's no navigation system, but that's why Jimmy also installed a GPS receiver. Aside from that, what nav system lets the passengers write e-mail on the road?

Also wired into the in-dash monitor is a Panasonic Focal spy camera that's cleverly mounted where the factory trunk-pop button was originally located. As we flew down the switchbacks that make up the most dangerous parts of the infamous Mulholland Drive, I was suddenly no longer staring at a Windows XP desktop; instead, I was getting car sick trying to understand why the spy camera mirrors the car's direction in the monitor. For every left turn the car makes, the monitor makes it seem like the car is going the other direction.