Deep Dive: Audi’s 2017 R20 Supercar Plans Revealed
Bugatti has the Veyron. Bentley recently unveiled the Continental GT3.
Lamborghini is laying the finishing touches on the Aventador
Superveloce. Porsche will soon release the 918 Spyder. And what does
Audi have? It was supposed to have the R8 e-tron, but that car is either
half-dead or barely alive, depending on your source. An ailing halo car
is not what the new R&D chief Wolfgang Dürheimer expected when he
recently moved over from Bentley. Instead, the ex-BMW and Porsche top
manager is pushing for a new, even more ambitious sports car project
known as R20.
While the chairman of the board Rupert Stadler has not yet abandoned the
zero-emissions R8 e-tron, Wolfgang Dürheimer seems to favor a
street-legal LeMans racer as the most suitable means to burnish the
marque’s reputation. At a glance, this approach may appear overly
ambitious, but then the gestation of such a car is not rocket science.
What helps is that all current LeMans contenders are in essence
two-seaters with the passenger seat removed, so the packaging is already
there. Although one could easily fuse the hardcore engineering concept
with a relatively conventional supercar body style, Audi’s
high-performance squad decided to model the road car after the racecar.
