Canceled Audi Skorpion Would've Been a Diesel Le Mans Racer for the Road

Between 2000 and 2014, an Audi prototype took home overall victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans 13 times. If that dominance happened in the '90s, it's quite possible the automaker would've developed a roadgoing version of its champions; if not because it wanted to, because the regulations might have required it to. But in 2013, Audi was reportedly mulling such a halo vehicle, rumored to have been called "Project Scorpion." Now, 11 years on, we're getting a peek at it for the first time.

More accurately, it's a peek at what the Skorpion, as it was internally known, might've looked like. A non-functional design study for the flagship was recently displayed in Audi's Horch Museum in Zwickau, Germany. The facility has shared a few images of it, and much like that M1-inspired supercar BMW was working on just before the pandemic, it's a bittersweet vision of what could've been.

Precious few details are revealed in the post, but here's what we know. Skorpion was indeed planned as a street version of the R18 TDI series, in the vein of the 911 GT1 Strassenversion, or Mercedes CLK-GTR. It was intended to sit above the R8 in Audi's range of road cars. At the time—between 2010 and 2013, according to the museum—the R18 was running a 3.7-liter turbocharged diesel V6 with hybrid power. Yes, this could've been a diesel hypercar, and likely the only one ever to exist. Audi had flirted with the idea several years earlier with the R8 V12 TDI concept, but that never saw production for cost reasons.