For Audi, success in racing provides a lot more than some vague performance halo for the brand. The company’s sustained commitment to global motorsports also has served as a highly productive proving ground for advanced technologies that end up in marketplace vehicles.
“If you race, but only race, all you’ve done is define a motorsports team,” Audi of America President Scott Keogh said at a big auto-industry conference. “But if your top priority is to transfer technology and integrate the lessons from racing, then you have defined an entire company. This is why Audi races and it captures our clear view on the value of motorsports.”
Whatever Audi is doing with motor sports for its brand, it's working: Keogh also said that Audi would beat its goal of 150,000 sales for 2013, on the strength of strong and growing demand for main vehicles such as its Q5 SUV, an expansion of its lineup of clean-diesel versions of primary models, and interest in its limited-volume "S" performance series.
No doubt Audi continues to capture the attention not only of motorsports fans but also of a good number of premium-car buyers globally with its continued domination of the 24 Hours of Le Mans road race each summer—which an Audi vehicle just won for the 12th time in the last 14 races—but the brand also has treated racing as an important technology-development laboratory and brand-enhancement venue for decades.
Audi introduced all-wheel-drive technology in the fall of 1980 at a European championship-racing event in Portugal, for example; it won the event, and soon Audi Quattro all-wheel-drive not only was transforming the brand’s own vehicle lineup but also the entire auto industry. Now, Quattro vehicles comprise 88 percent of the Audi sales mix in the United States, and all-wheel-drive was featured in 52 percent of all luxury cars sold in America last year, according to Polk data.
“This story shows the Audi approach,” Keogh said. “If you want to introduce a radical or novel concept, introduce it at the extremes. If you do that, more times than not acceptance will follow.” Similarly, Audi success at the race track with direct-shift gearboxes, aluminum frames and chassis components, clean-diesel engines, LED headlights and a myriad of other technologies have led to their adoption in some form in Audi production vehicles.
Matrix-beam LED headlights are based on the lighting in the Audi R18 racers and automatically adjust to road conditions, Keogh said. “They will be headed to updated A8 sedans for Europe by the end of this year,” he said, “and—[federal government willing] to US cars someday.” Audi's current LED-headlight technology was highlighted in a 2012 Super Bowl commerical. In the meantime, he said, “other manufacturers have quickly made LED lighting an industry standard
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