Audi Race Cars

Here’s a first look at the Audi S1 Hoonitron prototype, which was designed and built by the folks at Ingolstadt, especially for drift legend, Ken Block.

Hoonigan are back with another crazy drag race on their YouTube channel. This time, it’s two completely different cars from two completely different eras. It’s old school versus new school and American versus European, as a mildly modified Audi RS6 Avant take on a purpose-built, 1967 Pikes Peak Chevrolet Camaro.

For a while, we have been hearing about Porsche and Audi planning to enter Formula One. Volkswagen has been trying to find ways of gaining a foothold in the F1 racing series, since 2010 and now, the German automotive giant might finally be on to something. With recent, false reports of Audi’s acquisition of McLaren, we deemed it wise to shed light on matters.

Ken Block recently made the transition, from Ford to Audi. His relationship with the German premium brand took him to Audi Tradition, in Ingolstadt, Germany. The facility, which comprises of some unassuming, at first glance, buildings, houses the most legendary cars from Audi’s rich motorsport history. The cool part is that all of them get driven every now and then and Ken Block had a go in the rarest and ultimate Audi rally car – the Sport Quattro RS 002.

Audi’s R8 track-only lineup is getting bigger and better. The R8 LMS has 83 driver titles and 106 additional championship victories under its belt already. To make sure this record only gets better in the future, the company has come up with an Evo II iteration of the LMS GT3. It features a new wing, a redesigned air intake, and an upgraded suspension setup amongst other things. It breaches the half-a-million-dollar mark after price conversion.

You don’t really see Audi come up with such stuff, but the automaker has revealed a ‘Color Edition’ of its most powerful product - the R8 LMS GT2. But, in all fairness, it deserves to be pampered with such appearance editions, considering it is the German automaker’s flagship race car. Audi is offering it in six different exterior shades, each one looking better than the other. There are no changes made to the cabin or the drivetrain, but you can’t expect much with a premium price increase of just $13,000.

The 2021 Audi RS3 LMS is an upgraded version of the company’s customer race car for the TCR racing series. Based on the fourth-generation Audi A3, which went into production in 2020, the 2021 RS3 LMS is the brand’s first all-new design for the racing series since the LMS debuted in 2016. On top of the updated exterior design that borrows from the road car, the 2021 RS3 LMS also features a more ergonomic cockpit with improved safety, a revised four-cylinder engine, and a new transmission. Let’s find out more about it in the review below.

German luxury brand Audi will, in a couple of years’ time, be back doing two things that it does really well: go fast on dirt and go fast in really long circuit races. In other words, Audi announced that the 2020-2021 season of Formula E will be the last for Audi as a factory team, the money spent keeping the Audi Sport Team Abt Schaeffler operation at the sharp end of the world’s best-well-known EV racing series being redirected to a couple of new and very interesting projects.

Thus, Audi is already developing an electric SUV that it will race in the Dakar Rally as early as 2022 and, then, a return to the 24 Hours of Le Mans and, presumably, the FIA World Endurance Championship (FIA WEC) is scheduled for 2023 or 2024 when Audi Sport will show up with an LMDh (Le Mans Daytona-Hybrid) prototype on the grid.

If you’re anything like us, then you’re surely missing a day well spent near and around the Goodwood Festival of Speed Hillclimb. Ask anybody who attended the show even once and you’ll know that the smell of gasoline and the eardrum-battering engine sounds go hand in hand with the amazing stories each car has to tell. This Nothelle-Kamei Audi Coupe from 1981 is the perfect example.

Evo photographer Dominic Fraser has found the perfect way to kill time during isolation. All he needed was his camera, his kid’s Audi Sport Quattro S1 Lego set, and a lot of patience. The result is a massively creative set of pictures that bring a nod back to the sheer madness of Audi’s rally car and the huge balls of those who got to drive it.

The Goodwood Festival of Speed is a great place to go if you want to see some of the world’s most revered racing cars of the past as well as a vast array of modern machinery and peeks into the future. The festival that takes places annually since 1993 on the grounds of the Goodwood House is also the place favored by some manufacturers to unveil their new products. The 2019 edition was chosen by Audi as the perfect occasion to pull the wraps off Audi Sport’s latest creation: the 640 horsepower Audi R8 LMS GT2, the most powerful racing car Audi has ever sold through its Customer Racing department. It’s designed for a new formula of Grand Touring racing that slots between GT3 and GT4 and caters for amateur racers looking for hight output machinery that’s quick down a straight line and easy to manage through the twisty bits.

Audi is a pragmatic company. Audi doesn’t put out a product for a class it doesn’t think will succeed. When Audi finally built a GT3-spec car, the class had been around for three full seasons, and it showed no signs of slowing down with more cars joining in (that same year Alpina debuted a B6-based contender, for instance) at a steady pace. Then there was the R8 LMS GT4, the GT3’s baby brother, its more pedestrian relative that is still tremendously fast (it puts out somewhere between 580 horsepower and 600 horsepower sans limiter, as much as the GT3 car without restrictions) and also expensive.

The RS3 LMS followed suit, the first sedan built by Audi Sport, one that, again, was built to be raced in a burgeoning category: TCR Touring Cars. The RS3 arrived in 2017, three years after the TCR format was first introduced. This is what makes the R8 LMS GT2 the odd one out. It’s the first Audi Sport-built car to be launched before any cars built to this ruleset ever took the track. So Audi must already know that it will be a success.

The 2019 Goodwood Festival of Speed was the stage for many impressive firsts and among them has been the worldwide debut of Audi Sport Customer Racing’s latest product, the ludicrous Audi R8 LMS GT2. With 640 horsepower, it’s faster than its GT3 and GT4 brethren but, somehow, it slots in between the two. Audi Sport says it’s the most potent car to come out of the Customer Racing program, and you’ll be able to see it on track next year as Stephane Ratel Organization (SRO) will allow the GT2 class to compete in series like the GT Sports Club in Europe and the GT World Challenge America across the Atlantic.

Racing has a tendency to become more and more expensive as time goes on. The pattern is as follows: a sanctioning body or a championship organizer proposes a new ruleset for a new category that’s supposed to replace an older, prohibitively expensive one. Everyone involved is happy, the new class is launched, it becomes popular, and as it starts to gain momentum, the cars evolve pushed by factory involvement and, in a matter of years, they become too expensive, and we’re back to square one. This is, broadly, what happened with the (still) highly popular GT3 formula that turned, from one category catering for amateur drivers, to one that comprises the bulk of today’s leading sports car and luxury car manufacturers, many of them pouring serious amounts of money in developing race cars able to win on the world stage. Let’s see how GT2 plans to fix this issue. In a way...

Audi just unveiled an incredibly powerful 2.0-liter, turbocharged, four-cylinder engine for its Audi RS5 DTM racing car. With a power output of 610 horsepower and half the weight of the 4.0-liter, V-8 it replaces, the new engine does not only provide 110 horsepower more than before, but it also slashed the weight of the DTM racer to 2,200 pounds. However, DTM practically summoned it with the change of rules in the DTM championship.

With the new DTM championship season warming up to start in May, the manufacturers are getting ready to compete following the new set of rules. The most significant change is the decision to dismiss the 4.0-liter, V-8, naturally aspirated engines in favor of the new, 2.0-liter, turbocharged fours. All in a move to close the gap between the road cars and its racing avatars in the DTM. What is more, DTM capped the power output for engines used in racing cars to 620 horsepower (plus 30 horsepower more for the push-to-pass maneuvers). That means that Audi did what the regulations allowed. If regulations allowed that this turbocharged, 2.0-liter engine could have up to 1,000 horsepower, Audi would make it like that. It happened already.