Press Release
The Making of the Audi Le Mans quattro
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Creating a car in double-quick time with craftsmanship and high-tech
- Ready to run in only eleven months
- Top-secret task for a small Audi team
- Combining motor racing, luxury, high-tech and design
The Audi Le Mans quattro is the first car of its kind: a high-performance sports car that sends a tingle down your spine but is also suitable for regular day-to-day driving - a driving machine with luxury built in. It was developed in conditions of strict secrecy, according to the Audi philosophy that even a show car must be close to reality and fully functional. Only eleven months elapsed between the first design sketches and the car's sensational debut at the 2003 Frankfurt Motor Show. The car's concept indicates the direction that future Audi developments will take, with its combination of stimulating design and the brand's entire motor-sport and technical know-how. But how does a show car like the Le Mans quattro come into being? Let us look at the making of this car in more detail.
Our first source of information is Dirk Isgen, Head of Concept Development at AUDI AG. He tells us: "Following the Pikes Peak quattro and the Nuvolari quattro, this is the third Audi concept car to appear this year. It is evidence of our future formal idiom and the brand's model policy. It is a thoroughbred mid-engined sports car concept that for the first time makes the technical features of the successful Audi R8 competition car available for road driving. You can imagine that we are doubly pleased when the innovative high-tech features on a car such as this prove to function well and the car can be driven."
The Le Mans quattro certainly has a vast number of new technical features, for example its innovative LED lighting, its aluminium frame structure with carbon-fibre reinforced outer skin made of plastic and composite material, its digital cockpit display, the 5.0-litre twin-turbo V10 engine with petrol direct injection FSI and the new Audi magnetic ride suspension concept - all visionary technologies that are far more than a glimpse of some distant future, since they can now be sampled in practice in the Le Mans quattro.
It took the team a mere eleven months to design and construct this car with its top-quality cutting-edge technology. This tight time schedule was a dream and a nightmare at one and the same time for the small development team assembled by overall project manager Bernhard Voll (Technical) and project managers Rüdiger Kiehn (Design), Frank Lamberty (Exterior Design) and Jens Sieber (Interior Design). Lamberty comments: "Assuming responsibility for a complete car is a very attractive prospect, but with a time schedule like this, the pressure and stress are much more severe. You have to enjoy what you're doing!"
For the Le Mans quattro project a core team of eight Audi employees was nominated, comprising two technical specialists and six designers, but with additional support from numerous experts from a wide variety of internal Audi departments. By way of comparison, the development time needed for a series-production car is in the region of 36 months, and makes use of all the personnel capacity available in a major industrial group. For the Le Mans quattro, the designers and technicians had less than a third of this time at their disposal. Sieber recalls: "It's as if the product creation process were speeded up, like an old film."
