Newsflashes

The Audi Sport family is mourning the loss of Dieter Basche: the former Head of Audi Motorsport has died at the age of 88. Basche was an engineer at Audi Sport from the very beginning. Iconic rally and racing cars such as the Audi Sport quattro S1, the Audi 90 quattro IMSA-GTO and the Audi V8 quattro for the DTM bear his signature. Basche remained closely associated with the brand with the four rings even after his retirement. “Audi owes many victories and championship titles to Dieter Basche. He was a brilliant technician, but above all a great person and extremely popular at the Audi Sport alumni reunions,” said Rolf Michl, Managing Director of Audi Sport GmbH. “Audi was in his heart. We will miss him.”

The overall victory of Carlos Sainz and Lucas Cruz at the Dakar Rally on January 19, 2024 concludes Audi’s rally raid program. The brand has achieved a historic new milestone with the first overall victory of a low-emission T1U prototype with an electric drivetrain, high-voltage battery and energy converter. Thanks to a residue-based reFuel fuel for the energy converter, Audi is reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent. “We have made history with this success and attracted a lot of attention worldwide,” says Head of Audi Motorsport Rolf Michl. “It was a hard-earned and extremely emotional victory for a highly motivated team. Team Audi Sport and Q Motorsport showed exemplary team spirit in a particularly tough edition of this challenging motorsport event. After setbacks last season, we managed to turn the tide and prevailed this time around against a number of strong teams and very good drivers. My thanks go to everyone involved, whose hard work made this successful conclusion to the program possible.” Audi is ending the rally project as planned after its third participation in the Dakar Rally, and the consideration of a possible participation in the 2024 World Rally Raid Championship has been rejected. After extremely high spare parts consumption at the 2023 Dakar, a very intensive test program in 2023 and the damage that occurred, as well as the very tough 2024 Dakar Rally, most of the prototype parts have been used up as a thorough analysis showed. The long lead times in the production of such one-offs are sometimes up to two years due to very few, highly specialized suppliers for Audi’s extremely complex prototype. This means that the framework conditions are not in place within which Audi could ensure successful participation in the World Rally Raid Championship during an entire season.

Track test premiere in Sardinia: For the first time, international journalists from France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Spain and the USA drove the Audi RS Q e-tron themselves. The desert rally prototype with its electric drive sparked unanimous enthusiasm. For Christian Rehberger from Donaukurier, the drive in the race car was a premiere: „I’m a total rookie,” said the daily newspaper’s editor. It was great. I learned a lot on just a few laps. The car makes it really easy, too.” Emme Hall of CNET from the U.S. was blown away by the force of the power delivery: “This electric powertrain with its huge torque that is just ready without delay is overwhelming. The car is very easy to control with the right pedal.” This ease also impressed other journalists. Linus Pröjtz of the Swedish magazine Teknikens Värld summed up, “I’ve never driven a car like this before. I could just drive off with this ‘monster’ and it was fun right away. That’s a nice compliment to the engineers.”