This weekend, Audi will be battling for its 14th victory in the Le Mans 24 Hours. The aim, again, is to cover the longest distance with maximum efficiency because, since 2014, regulations have been in effect that require the teams to achieve the maximum from a specified amount of fuel. Audi was already the best in this discipline in the debut year.
Audi defeats Porsche and Toyota – that was the headline in 2014, following Audi’s fifth consecutive victory at Le Mans. The race was undecided up to the penultimate hour. Only then did Marcel Fässler (CH), André Lotterer (D) and Benoît Tréluyer (F) prevail against the Porsche drivers and scored the brand with the Four Rings’ 13th victory. Similarly impressive was the efficiency with which this win was achieved. The Audi R18 e-tron quattro covered 5,165.391 kilometers – 662.5 more than the year before when the race was marked by many caution periods. A few figures illustrate the efforts made by the Audi engineers. The new four-liter V6 TDI engine, together with all other developments, helped reduce consumption in a single step by 22 percent compared with the 2013 season. Since the beginning of the TDI era at Le Mans in 2006, Audi even saved 38 percent fuel.
In terms of lightweight design, Audi managed a major step as well. The engineers saved 45 kilograms of weight in the LMP sports car compared with the model from the previous year. As a result, the R18 e-tron quattro weighed only 870 kilograms.
