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.
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