Yahoo Autos Volkswagen Ends its Participation in Motorsports
The Volkswagen Group is in the midst of a huge shakeup, cutting costs and shifting a huge amount of investment over to electric vehicles as part of its Dieselgate settlement commitments. That means big changes in motorsports: Today, the Volkswagen brand announced it's giving up racing altogether.
It's not entirely surprising. Last year, VW said it would end all non-electric motorsports programs, halting production of the Mk7 Golf GTI TCR race car and canceling development of a successor based on the Mk8 GTI. All that was left was the electric ID.R prototype, which was built to set lap records at various tracks around the world, and technical support for customer rally cars. Now, the 169 employees of VW's motorsports programs will be integrated into the automaker's road-car division to aid in the development of EVs.
