Audi S2 review: the turbo-five collector car Bahrain never officially got
3/5MotorsSouq Editorial Team
The S2 is not a Bahrain used-car-market purchase in any normal sense — it is a specialist import for someone who already knows they want a five-cylinder Audi turbo classic and has budgeted accordingly for parts sourced from Europe and a specialist workshop rather than the local Audi dealer. Judged as that kind of purchase it is honest and mechanically straightforward; judged as a daily car in 45°C heat with no factory air-conditioning refresh in over thirty years, it asks a great deal of an owner.
Pros
- Turbocharged inline-five and permanent quattro drive that started the whole Audi performance formula
- Mechanically simple and well-documented by the classic-Audi enthusiast community
- Quattro system is the same reliable mechanical layout Audi still uses, without modern electronic complexity
- Genuinely rare in Bahrain, which matters to a collector buyer
Cons
- Never sold new in the Gulf; every car here is a private grey-market import
- No Bahrain dealer service history or factory-trained technician support
- Parts sourcing means ordering from Europe and waiting
- Original air-conditioning is thirty-plus years old and rarely up to a Bahrain summer without rework
Long before Audi attached an RS badge to anything, the S2 established the template every fast Audi since has followed: a turbocharged engine, permanent quattro all-wheel drive, and a body that looked almost ordinary from the outside. Built from 1990 to 1995 on the Audi 80/90 Coupé platform, the S2's 2.2-litre turbocharged inline-five made 220 hp — modest by modern standards, delivered with the five-cylinder engine note that later became an Audi signature in its own right.
Audi never sold the S2 new through a Gulf distributor. Cars in this region today arrived as private imports, most commonly from Germany or the UK, brought in by enthusiasts rather than dealers. That single fact should shape every decision a Bahrain buyer makes about one.
What owning one here actually means
There is no factory warranty, no local Audi service history to check and no guarantee that a Manama workshop has ever worked on the engine under the bonnet. Specialist knowledge exists in the classic-Audi enthusiast community rather than at the official dealer, and parts sourcing generally means ordering from Europe and waiting.
The upside is mechanical honesty: a turbocharged five-cylinder and a five-speed manual are simple, well-understood components with three decades of enthusiast documentation behind them, and the quattro system is the same fundamentally reliable mechanical layout Audi still uses today, not an electronically managed system with its own failure modes.
Who this is actually for
Buy an S2 in Bahrain only if the point is the car itself — the history, the five-cylinder sound, the fact that it predates every RS model by years — and not because it looks like an affordable way into old-school Audi performance. It is not a car to commute in through a Bahrain summer without real air-conditioning work done first, and it is not a car with any meaningful parts support a few streets from home.