Audi will field a four-car works team in the 2012 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 16/17 - two of them with an all-new diesel/hybrid powertrain and all-wheel drive.
The R18 e-tron quattro will make its race debut on May 5 in the six-hour race at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium as a test run for the iconic Sarthe weekend.
The e-tron quattro system recovers energy on the front axle during braking and feeds it into a flywheel accumulator, to be released as electrical power to drive the front wheels under acceleration, once the car reaches 120km/h.
All the while the 375kW V6 TDI combustion engine continues to drive the rear wheels; the two systems complement each other to create the e-tron quattro concept.
FAST-TRACK DEVELOPMENT
The project started in February 2010, and the first chassis was ready for testing only 18 months later, a remarkable achievement for a technology that's never been tested in motorsport and doesn't even exist in a production car.
In order to compensate for the weight of the e-tron hardware, Audi went all out to make the new R18 as light as possible; weight was sliced wherever possible, including the first ever endurance-racing transmission with a carbon-fibre housing, which made a big difference by itself.
Then somebody said, “What if…?”, and they built two of the ultralight new R18 chassis without the e-tron front-wheel drive, but otherwise exactly the same as the quattro.
They turned out to the lightest LMP1 cars Audi had ever built and were so successful in testing they were named R18 ultra and will be run alongside the hybrids in the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the newly established World Endurance Championship.
“Our drivers were positive about them from the very first laps.”
Head of Audi Motorsport, Dr Wolfgang Ullrich, explained: “The new R18 ultra is a distinct evolution of last year's Le Mans race-winning car. Without the weight saved on the R18 ultra we wouldn't have been able to develop e-tron quattro car, which is absolutely identical with the exception of the hybrid system.”
The first of the two hybrid cars will be driven at Spa - and then at Le Mans - by 2011 winning trio Marcel Fässler, André Lotterer and Benoît Tréluyer, with the second quattro car in the hands of Dindo Capello, Tom Kristensen and Allan McNish - six drivers with a toital of 13 Le Mans wins between them.
WORLD ENDURANCE CHAMPIONSHIP
New signing Loic Duval will pilot one of the conventional-drive R18 ultras, teamed with Timo Bernhard and Romain Dumas, with Marco Bonanomi, Oliver Jarvis and Mike Rockenfeller in the other - although Rockefeller will miss the Spa race due to a clash with a DTM commitment.
After Le Mans, Audi plans to enter one of each version in the remaining rounds of the World Endurance Championship, with André Lotterer and Allan McNish as lead drivers.
The cars won't be ready for the first round of the series at Sebring in Florida on March 17, however, so Audi has pulled three of last year's cars out of retirement for a last hurrah in the hands of Fässler/Lotterer/Tréluyer, Capello/Kristensen/McNish and Bernhard/ Dumas/Duval respectively.