Like a lot of project car ideas, it all started over a conversation over beverages. The location was Las Vegas – The SEMA Show to be exact. The venue was the Chandelier Bar, a multi-level establishment within The Cosmopolitan Casino that is exactly what you’d expect. The conversation was with a close friend, one that managed Audi Accessories and Audi collection in the United States at the time.
The challenge was this. He was looking for something creative to build that grab attention and also help as a basis on which to display Audi collection. He was leaning towards a vintage DKW-Auto Union – a 60s era microbus-like van based on the 3=6 two-stroke hardware that predated Audi’s return to the fore in the 1970s. The Schnellaster is cool – like an Audi version of a VW Microbus, but it’s also obscure so most who encounter it don’t exactly know what they’re looking at. At this point, age is also playing into its obscurity because most people who may remember seeing them on the road are increasingly not on the road themselves.
That’s not the case with 80s cars. Redwood was coming to the fore. Hagerty hadn’t yet purchased them, but the events were getting plenty of attention of the 80s/90s genre they were pioneering – now known as the “Rad era”.
In the 1980s, the quattro arrived and wiped the floor with the competition in the World Rally Championship. Yet while the quattro had become the stuff of legends, Audi did’t have any sort of truck or van like the Schnellaster on which the project could be built. That said, the HB Audi Team rally effort had built Volkswagen T3 support trucks in period complete with team liveries. While they themselves were also obscure, most 80s and 90s kids know what a Volkswagen Vanagon is, a cab-over squared-off replacement for the iconic VW Microbus that was coming into its own as the vehicle-of-choice for the booming #VanLife trend.
A Vanagon with Audi rally livery was an amazing concoction connecting too much-loved automotive icons, doing so authentically and without forcing it. A rally-support Volkswagen truck was, I argued, “the perfect solution.”
Audi of America would end up building two examples – a larger LT Van and later a smaller T3 Doka – “Doka” meaning “double cabin”, the German equivalent of a crew cab pickup. Even cooler and more obscure, my friend at Audi located a one-off evaluation prototype Volkswagen had built for consideration of a T3 Doka for the U.S. market. While Dokas typically have three doors, this U.S. spec truck had four. VW eventually sidelined the project and that T3 ended up doing battery and support duty at the port of Houston where it had begun to rust as ocean-approximate cars of that era are prone to do. It was saved, was fully restored and did the rounds in support of Audi collection for several years.
THIS T3 DOKA SUPPORT TRUCK PROJECT
That Doka inspired me, making me want to purchase one at some point… at least enough that I tend to watch European market classifieds, including “doka” searches in my favorites. Then, a few weeks ago, a white T3 Doka Syncro (VW vernacular for all-wheel drive) much like the one you see here popped up for sale. It had a slight lift, “steelie” wheels, off-road tires and a roll-bar.
That plus a little Audi Sport vinyl would make an incredible car to own. Audi Sport support trucks tended to be pretty plain as 80s era Volkswagen T3 specification goes. I’ve not seen any photos of any all-wheel drive Syncro models and none would have had the roll cage or the slight lift with larger off-road tires of the cleanly built example I found for sale online.
Owning one at this time isn’t exactly in the cards, but that didn’t stop me from turning to the tools I have at my disposal to imagine what could be done. More recent Google Gemini / Nano Banana tools are particularly good at rendering cars with a level of realism we couldn’t touch before. In as much, they’re excellent for rendering projects you may want to build. That’s exactly what I did here, making the familiar even cooler with the OEM+ upgrades the builder of that listed T3 had already included.
There are really two eras of Audi rally that used these support trucks – at least as measured by liveries. There’s the simple Audi Sport tri-colore phase of brown, taupe and red, or there’s these three plus yellow for the HB Audi Team years when HB Cigarettes sponsored the team. Both are iconic, and were an obvious focus.
For the third theme, I went a bit more obscure. In the years leading up to the arrival of the quattro, Audi had fielded some front-wheel drive 80 (B2) sedans in just a few rounds of rally. Audi Sport hadn’t been fully sorted as a branding effort yet and graphics from those initial years is a bit different. Colors are more red, burgundy and black. There’s no quattro branding as of yet and big white lettering in a unique font reads “Audi” or “Vorsprung durch Technik” on Volkswagen LT support vans seen in scant few photos from the period. Due to its obscurity and the now iconic marketing tagline, I also wanted to experiment with graphics from this era as well.
Trucks from the time varied, so I ran the queries a lot in order to play with various configurations. Lettering and logos move around, as do stripes. In some there is more color, while others tend to be more white like the T3 listed on the market.
Which is my favorite? I think I lean towards the pre-quattro graphics. Maybe you disagree.
T3 POSTSCRIPT
A few years after that first conversation and now a few years ago, the facility where the Audi of America-built Doka was housed was closed and most of Audi of America’s vintage assets were sold off or sent back to Audi Tradition. I’m not 100% sure what happened to the Doka, but I hope it survives because it was mega cool.
PHOTO GALLERY
