Audi Customer Racing Program Waiting for You

Audi is taking us into its customer racing world, giving us a taste of the R8 LMS experience. The race car has been eating miles and miles of track since 2009, with quattro GmbH building the vehicle at its motorsport site in Heilbronn-Biberach. There are currently 35 units of the vehicle serving as motorsport instruments for customers and importer teams around the world.

The customer racing version is based on the aluminum body of the road-going version, with 90 percent of the components being identical. The main difference is that the racing version comes with a safety cell.

In order to save weight, the outer skin of the Audi R8 LMS is made of carbon fiber (like we said, certain parts, like the doors and the roof, are made of aluminum). The body isn’t painted, being coated only with a cathodic dip coating (CDC).

The race car’s body comes from the R8 production shop in Neckarsulm. Subsequently, the racer is assembled at the satellite site in Heilbronn-Biberach, roughly five kilometers (three miles) away. Over half of the parts of the standard car are used for the racer without modifications or only with slight ones.

In fact, the technology transfer goes both ways, as the coilover suspension of the R8 GT (the most extreme road version of the R8) is borrowed from the customer racing version.

Audi plans to expand the concept of customer racing, offering buyers an entire range of motorsport-destined vehicles starting from next year, with the Audi TT RS being the first model.