road test of Audi Le Mans.....

[bigpoppanils]

08:30 Feb. 16, 2004)

Four Times The Fun: Le Mans quattro is like a German Gallardo, but don’t tell Audi that

By MARK VAUGHN

Should Audi build this car? Show of hands? Yes, you there in the front row, chairman of the board of Audi AG, Martin Winterkorn, we see you waving, sir. Yes sir, calm down, sir. Yes, we know, we know.

When the chairman of the board is practically in a straitjacket with enthusiasm over your project car, that could be seen as a positive sign. And the chairman does love this car. It was Winterkorn who drove the Audi Le Mans quattro into its big press debut the night before the Frankfurt motor show last year. And it was he who drove it three days before that, too, pushing the fragile concept more than 110 mph on Audi’s test track after being asked not to exceed 50. (You can’t tell the chairman, “No, stop.â€)

AUDI LE MANS QUATTRO

BASE PRICE: $80,000 to $120,000

POWERTRAIN: 5.0-liter, 610-hp, 553-lb-ft V10; awd, six-speed automatic

CURB WEIGHT: 3366 pounds

0-60 MPH: 3.7 seconds (mfr.)

And at that press intro in Frankfurt it was Winterkorn who, when asked if Audi would build the Le Mans quattro, said, “Who knows? Perhaps it will probably even be built!â€

So is Audi really going to build this? As if we needed any further confirmation, we asked our deep mole over in darkest Ingolstadt, who replied in German, “Wenn der große Mann sagt, daß er einen Sportwagen will, dann wird ihn sofort ein Sportwagen gebaut.†Translation: “When the big man says, ‘I want a sports car,’ you build him a sports car.â€

So the Audi Le Mans quattro is as good as coming, let’s get that out of the way. And that’s a good thing for rich guys the world over. Officially, the Le Mans is meant as a tribute to the Audi R8s that have pretty much pimp-slapped the field at every sports car race they’ve entered in the last four or five years. That includes victories at Le Mans in 2000, 2001 and 2002, as well as various ALMS successes and lots of other Audi goodwill spread over the planet.

But Audi couldn’t take its open-cockpit Le Mans racer, slap some plates on it and offer it for sale. So Audi built this car instead. If it looked to the R8 for inspiration, it looked at another car for parts. Audi owns Lamborghini, remember? Lamborghini makes the Murciélago and, more importantly, the Gallardo. Now every Audi PR professional has at the top of his or her official task list, “Don’t let anyone say the Le Mans is just a rebodied Gallardo!†So let’s get that out of the way right now, too. Just to make sure we got that message, one of the last things the top Audi PR guy said to us the day we drove the Le Mans, and after we had asked a lot of pesky Lamborghini questions about it, was, “And remember,†he wagged a finger in the air to emphasize that this point, if no other we took away from our day, was the most important, “it is not a Gallardo.â€

“Not a Gallardo, not a Gallardo,†we repeated all the way home and most of the next week.

But you could draw some comparisons. The Gallardo and the Le Mans quattro both have 5.0-liter, 40-valve 90-degree V10 engines; Lamborghini’s E-Gear six-speed paddle-shift transmissions; mid-engine configurations; all-wheel drive; double wishbones front and rear and an aluminum space frame that Lamborghini fully acknowledges is an Audi product. There are even two front-mounted radiators for engine coolant and side-mounted radiators for oil on both cars.

So they are similar, but not exact twins. The Le Mans has a longer wheelbase and overall length than the Gallardo, as well as a higher roofline. That means more room inside.

“The Gallardo is more of a performance sports car,†said Martin Ertl, head of design management at Audi who gave us a tour of the Le Mans concept car. “The Le Mans is a car that you could drive all day at the track and then take to the opera at night.â€

Presumably after a shower, but we get his point. The extra space in the cabin of the Le Mans means there is room behind the seats for luggage, not a lot of room, but significantly more than in the Gallardo. The seats themselves fold forward to gain access to that room, too.

The higher roofline means loads of spacious comfort, spacious by semi-supercar standards, at least. Six-footers and taller can sit in the cabin and not even think about the roof getting in the way. It felt like plenty of room for a helmet, for instance, though we didn’t have a helmet handy.

And as long as we’re talking about the interior, this one is very nice. It wouldn’t have to be changed very much at all to go into production. The driver is cocooned in a snug, but not claustrophobic wraparound that looked like it would be comfortable even after a very long drive, say 24 hours, maybe. Ertl called it, “that monoposto kind of feeling where the driver is the most important thing in the car.†The driver’s girlfriend might take exception to that categorization, but we understand.

Vision is surprisingly good, even out the rear side windows and straight out the back. The A-pillars are nice and skinny, and the view straight ahead goes unobstructed over the top of a long, flat dash.

There is a high-tech weave on the steering wheel, the instrument surround and on the seats. Who knows if this fabric will make it to production, but it works just fine on the concept. The weave is black, and the other colors inside are muted dark blues.

“We wanted to keep the intensity of the colors rather low,†said Ertl. “The basic idea of the interior is a very strong frame with material stretched over it.â€

As is traditional on concepts, the instruments are clever, perhaps too clever for production, but you never know nowadays. On the left side of the cluster is a stan-dard tachometer. That didn’t change. The right half is electronically interchangeable. One mode provides the standard speedometer and some gauges. Hit a button and that changes to Audi’s MMI—the multimedia interface from the A8 and the next A6. The MMI is controlled by a set of buttons on the center console. Hit the display button again and you get the Track Mode, which in production trim will show the layout of whatever racetrack you happen to be circling, as well as your position on it provided by GPS sensors. Though we were at Willow Springs in California, our Track Mode display had us circulating Le Mans, approaching White House corner. It was just a demo. A future variation will be able to tell the driver not only which gear to take for the next corner, but how fast to go through it. We know a few drivers who could benefit from that.

The double-wishbone suspension is adjustable from inside the cabin, too. It is a magnetic ride system developed by Sachs, but similar in practice to the Cadillac and Corvette setup—varying the electrical current through the shock fluid alters the fluid’s viscosity and changes the ride stiffness—simple, but effective.

The paddles for the shifter are behind the steering wheel. Pull the right paddle to upshift and the left to go down. Hold the left up, then pull the right and you get neutral. A small lever on the console engages reverse.

We crawled outside for a design walk-around. Ertl listed the details—LED headlights, big side scoops, tiny pop-up rear wing—but a design either sinks or swims pretty much on first glance and this one is a swimmer. It has lines and proportions that immediately work, no matter from which angle you look at the car. This is not one of those designs that has to grow on you. It looks great right out of the aluminum box.

“It’s a very classical Audi design,†said Ertl.

Two designers did the outside and two others did the inside. By chance, this team was composed of German and Austrian designers only. Ertl quickly pointed out that 11 countries are represented in Audi design.

Most Audis go through a process that starts with sketches by eight designers, of which five are chosen for 1:4-scale models then three for 1:1-scale models, and finally one design is selected, often incorporating elements of the final three. With the Le Mans, four people did sketches, three of which went to 1:4-scale models and two of which went to full-size clay. One of those became the Le Mans. You can see the other as Will Smith’s car in the summer movie release I, Robot, based on the sci-fi novel by Isaac Asimov. It has funky wheels and drives by itself most of the time.

The Le Mans, meanwhile, carries a coefficient of drag of 0.33, not the most slippery thing on the road, but it also has negative lift front and rear, which is very rare in a road-going car. Efficient or not, it looks good.

And it looks even better on the track, which is where we went next. Yes, despite only being allowed to ride in the Pikes Peak concept as a leaden passenger last year, this year we were allowed to pilot the Le Mans, slowly. That’s us behind the wheel in these fine photos and the guy sitting in the passenger seat is Christoph, a German technician along to keep the very expensive piece of technology on the pavement and to reach over and smack any non-CEO who exceeded that 50-mph limit. We pretty much drove it behind the photo car at around 40 mph. Christoph made a gasping noise if we got too close to the camera car. Nonetheless, we got something of a feel for the basic configuration. That driver’s position is as nice driving as it had earlier seemed with the car sitting still. Visibility is as good on the road as it had seemed it would be when we were sitting parked in the garage. The only things we might change for production are the mirrors, which could stand to be a little bigger.

The drivetrain has a few gremlins, such as some lugging when launching from a standstill, but it is just concept car stuff. The shifters work fine, we went up and down as high as third gear without a problem. The engine was not in tune, which was unfortunate since 610 hp and 553 lb-ft of torque are fun at any speed. With a curb weight of 3366 pounds, Audi claims the Le Mans will reach 62 mph in under four seconds from a standing start and 124 mph in 10.8. Can’t wait for that.

To get from the stock V10’s 500 hp and 376 lb-ft of torque, Audi handed the show car’s engine over to Volkswagen-owned Cosworth in England, the same company that made those all-conquering R8 engines. Cosworth added intercooled KKK twin turbochargers and Audi’s FSI high-pressure fuel injection. The addition of FSI meant other changes from the Lamborghini V10. The 5.0-liter displacement is the same, but there were changes to the stroke and bore required for FSI, as well as new pistons and a low-pressure cooling system as opposed to the Lamborghini’s high-pressure system.

The quattro drive is the same as the one on the A8, with a Torsen center differential diverting power to the wheels with the most grip. It varies from 20 percent front/80 percent rear to 70/30 depending on conditions.

We felt no slip whatsoever during our drive, we’re proud to say. Neither did we hear any squeaks or rattles. This car is really not that far removed from production, which is where it really ought to go.

It makes its own excellent business case. When Audi bought Lamborghini in 1998, it no doubt had plans to share this platform, thereby doubling the efficiency of Lamborghini’s engineering efforts and selling more cars the world over as a result.

Volkswagen chief Bernd Pischetsrieder said recently a production Le Mans would have far less horsepower than the Gallardo’s 500, as well as a significantly lower sticker price to avoid competing with the Lamborghini. Gallardos sell for about $160,000 to $170,000. So, significantly lower than that would also open up the market to a lot more Le Mans buyers. Pischetsrieder also hinted at a Le Mans price of between $80,000 and $120,000. The lower end of that spectrum bumps up against Porsche 911s. Finally, a car for mere millionaires.

If there is any further doubt in the halls of Ingolstadt, we say, build it.

And fer gosh sakes, see to it that Winterkorn guy gets one as a company car.

the article has a bunch of pictures too http://www.autoweek.com/cat_content.mv?port_code=autoweek&cat_code=coverstory&loc_code=index&content_code=00378283