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The real reason Audi races

The world has watched Audi have its way with endurance racing since 1998. What started as an intriguing race winner in 2000 that could be rebuilt so quickly that the ACO oversight organization changed the rules to slow Audi mechanics down, slowly morphed into a unique assassin, employing novel engineering methods to achieve series domination with its R18 E-Tron Quattro. Until recently. It's strange, then, that for all these years we didn't fully comprehend Audi's stated approach to motorsport. And so we sat down with Dr. Wolfgang Ulrich, head of Audi Motorsport, and Chris Reinke, head of Le Mans Prototype development while in Austin, TX, for the Lone Star Le Mans and World Endurance Championship race for answers. BMW, Corvette, Porsche, and Ferrari have healthy reputations, lucrative option sheets, and supported a robust trade in special editions by winning races. They have standalone racing divisions and they transfer the entire sheen of their racing endeavors to their road cars, a healthy part of what their customers buy into. Even though we know they improve their road cars with lessons learned racing, the belief is that they race because that's just what they do; those brand names mean racing. "Not one single euro is spent on a separate motorsports program." Yet Reinke said that for Audi, "Not one single euro is spent on a separate motorsports program. We [Audi Motorsport] are part of the Technical Department [of the road car company]. We are a pre-development lab for road-relevant technology." As in, Audi isn't racing out of core philosophy, it's racing only to improve its road cars. That helps explain why Audi's entire road car lineup doesn't bask in the same racing aura as those other brands even though Audi has been racing since it was called Horch. It's not a racing brand, it's a technology brand. Said Ulrich, "Instead of components, look at technologies – not lights, but lighting technologies, not engines, but engine technologies, like injection pressure technology is the same from the race car to the road car." That's nowhere near as exciting as, "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday," but it is arguably much more practical. Quattro is the most obvious example of racing tech for the street. For a less obvious one, Reinke said, "Audi Motorsport developed codes for computational fluid dynamics, and then we'd run the calculations on the Technical Department computers at night.

Daimler, BMW, Audi consortium nabs Nokia maps for $2.72B

A consortium of German automakers made up of Daimler, BMW, and Audi has reportedly banded together to buy Nokia's Here mapping division for the equivalent of about $2.7 billion. The particulars of the deal aren't yet official but could be announced at the end of July. Reuters claims that this info comes from anonymous insiders speaking to Manager Magazin in Germany. It might be too soon, however, to declare a buyer. Reuters also spoke to two other insiders, and they said that no deal has been completed yet. None of the firms involved has officially spoken about the negotiations. Some of the other bidders for the division have reportedly bowed out. Here is a high-definition digital mapping company that controls about 70 percent of the auto market. The company has a fleet of vehicles with cameras and LIDAR (pictured above) to generate all of the necessary information. It also partners with trucking companies to use their GPS data. Nokia started looking for potential buyers for Here earlier this year. Tech giants that reportedly included Uber and Apple were rumored to be interested, while German automakers also teamed up to submit a joint bid in part to protect their access to the maps. On paper, Here is only valued at around $785 million, but a sale in the billions now seems assured. Related Video: News Source: ReutersImage Credit: Nokia Here Earnings/Financials Audi BMW Technology here nokia here

Audi R8 lines up as safety car for Rolex 24 at Daytona

This weekend a new era begins in American sports car racing with the Rolex 24 at Daytona to kick off the new United SportsCar Championship, the freshly inked union between the Grand Am and American Le Mans Series. There'll be a wide variety of machinery lining up on the grid at the Florida speedway, including race-ready versions of the sports cars you can drive on the road, plus Daytona Prototypes, Le Mans Prototypes and even the DeltaWing. But at the front of the pack will be the Audi R8 5.2 FSI.
That's because Ingolstadt's flagship has been named as the official safety car for this, the 52nd annual Rolex 24 at Daytona. And so the R8 becomes the first pace car pressed into service for the United SportsCar Championship, although the model also paced last year's race (pictured above) when it was under the auspices of the Grand Am series.
The car in question appears to bear little in the way of modifications over the showroom version, save for some requisite graphics and maybe some emergency lighting to make it more visible - because while you wouldn't miss an R8 slicing its way through ordinary traffic on the road, it's another story entirely in a field full of competition machinery. Audi points out that the road-going R8 shares a good 50 percent of its components with the R8 LMS competing in the race, including its 5.2-liter V10 engine that's available this year with a new seven-speed dual-clutch transmission.