Yahoo Autos The Audi R8 Was A Legend From The Start
Audi R8 V10 Quattro Photo: Audi
Legends don’t die, especially automotive ones; they live on under plaques at car shows, in cheap posters stuck to childhood bedroom walls and in matchbox car collections forever. The Audi R8 is about to lay down its nameplate some twenty years after it first showed its face as a concept car at the 2003 Frankfurt Motor Show. Audi invited us out to Monterey Car Week for a proper high-speed send off of its famous mid-engine sports car at Weathertech Raceway Laguna Seca.
(Audi brought me out to Monterey, California, for Monterey Car Week and provided journalists with transportation around town, meals, and a gased-up, rear-wheel-drive Audi R8 V10 at Laguna Seca.)
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“We have to design, not a British mid-engine sports car, not an Italian mid-engine sports car, but a German mid-engine sports car. And I said, OK, that’s a cool message but what does that mean? Ah, we had to find our own identity.”
Audi R8R Prototype - 1999Photo: Brian Snelson
The Audi R8 started life in motorsport, with the Audi R8R prototype proceeding the R8 LMP, which would take 24 Hours of Le Mans by storm, winning from 2000 to 2005 — except in 2003 when the race was won by the Bentley Speed 8.
After its success in racing, Audi had its designers compete to create a road car based on the LMP. The deadline was aggressive. Work started in November 2002 on a show car that would be unveiled at the the 2003 Frankfurt Auto Show held in early September.
Audi R8 LMP - 2000Image: Vauxford
Lamberty described his own formula for the Audi R8 during a presentation to journalists; you simply take a Porsche 904, a Ducati 996, a predatory hawk and a...tennis ball. Mush them together and boom, one of the most iconic sports cars of the last two decades. The Porsche 904 is at least as surprising as the tennis ball as it is not considered a terribly successful car, but Lamberty loved its shape as well as its versatility. The 904 was a daily drivable mid-engined car after all; exactly what Audi wanted in the R8.
The tennis ball informed Lamberty’s initial approach to the design; pulling the shape of the R8 out of a sphere rather than a box. That the hawk inspired the side blades also surprised me. To me, the R8's side blades made it look like the gills of some quick and silent shark ready to strike from the murky depths.
One feverish design competition later and Lamberty’s Audi Le Mans Quattro Concept came out the winner. It was the third in series of race-inspired show cars, but the prospect of this one going into production was much more solid, thanks Volkswagen’s semi-recent acquisition of Lamborghini in 1998.
“That was the puzzle pieces that finally fit together,” Lamberty told Jalopnik.
Like so many of us, the Lamborghini Countach was Lamberty’s childhood hero car. So it’s fitting that Lamberty would realize that German identity de Silva was searching for thanks the Italian automaker. The R8 found a platform and engine companion in the Lamborghini Gallardo.
