![]() By the time the car hit the starting line, its powertrain's output was limited to 288 kilowatts (approximately 386 horsepower), and its onboard fuel capacity was capped at 300 liters (approximately 79 gallons). When Audi started work on the RS Q e-tron project, the FIA still did not have rules in place that were applicable to the electric racer. “If we’d wanted to make it to even the first fueling stop on battery power, we would have required a trailer to haul it,” joked Benedikt Brunninger, technical project leader for the RS Q e-tron. Audi knew its electric motors were up to the task courtesy of its now-defunct Formula E team, but it needed to find a way to ensure there was enough electricity on board to power these motors for the many miles that separate each stage of an off-road endurance race such as the Dakar Rally. The difficulty of the task was amplified by the brand's desire to enter an electric vehicle. Less familiar to Audi, though, was off-road endurance racing, and in order to send teams to Dakar, it needed to build a completely new car. ![]() The brand has also put in time competing in endurance racing. This tight schedule forced the RS Q e-tron's development team to rethink everything they knew about building race cars.Īudi's racing history includes decades of developing all-wheel-drive vehicles for the purpose of driving in the dirt. The densely packed development timeline of the RS Q e-tron saw the vehicle go from an ambitious idea at the beginning of 2020 to a dune-jumping, stage-winning racer in January 2022. ![]() It’s also one of only three built (done in a very short time and at a cost in the millions), so Audi was really hoping I, and the rest of the media members it brought out to drive this machine, would avoid running it into a cow while drunk on morning wine. It looks less like a race car than a weapon, a stealth bomber on wheels. The body of the RS Q e-tron has all the scoops and fat fenders-and a general sense of violence-of Audi’s past racers, but sits high on a double-wishbone suspension replete with Reiger gas shocks as thick as my thigh. Audi’s race machines always have an intimidating presence, from the flattened R18 Le Mans racer to the wide-bodied RS5 of the DTM series to the brand's prior Formula E car, with its insectile folds and wings. It’s wider than a GMC Hummer EV-a hulking space capsule of carbon fiber with air vents large enough to crawl through and 37-inch BFGoodrich tires as knobby as an arthritic knuckle. Emil Bergkvist, an actual Dakar co-driver, sat to the right of me in the RS Q e-tron's passenger seat, so it was pretty much exactly the same as driving Dakar. Here, the biggest distractions were the cows, all of which were wearing cute little bells, like in the cartoons, and the farmers, who kept offering me homemade wine, even though it was 9 a.m. Just replace nearly 6000 miles of skyscraper-high sand dunes, rocky desert terrain, and high-speed navigation with three laps around a small dirt track on a perfect spring day on a farm in Sardinia. Audi S8: A Luxury Sedan for Driver or PassengerĪudi brought me to Italy to get a taste of what its racing drivers experience piloting the RS Q e-tron in the two-week-long Dakar Rally in Saudi Arabia.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |