In the 2014 World Endurance Championship, no team faces more pressure to perform than Audi's dominant motorsports division, Audi Sport, and its trio of R18 e-tron Quattro racers. With fresh competition from fellow VW Group member Porsche, as well as a hard-charging Toyota team, the Prototype 1 field this year—and the season's holy grail, the 24 Hours of Le Mans—is shaping up to be furiously competitive. Lucky for us, during a preseason test session at Austin's Circuit of the Americas, we caught up with Audi Sport leader Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich (you might recognize him from Audi's Truth in 24 documentaries) to pick his brain on how the team's handling the pressure, the "Porsche effect," and how closely knit Audi Sport and Audi really are.
Car and Driver: Do you see your Le Mans dominance as a blessing or a curse heading into 2014?
Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich: "We have built a very strong team . . . we improved things from year to year, we collect experience from year to year, and we push each other to become better from year to year, and I think this should be an advantage compared to teams with less experience. But, people with less experience maybe try new approaches that we would not do, and maybe their approaches could end up as the better ones. Yes, it is an advantage to have a lot of experience and try to use all of the experience, but maybe because of the experience, you stay away from some decisions that, in a very certain situation, could be positive. Even if you have decided out of other experiences, that it is too risky.
C/D: Do you see Toyota's dark-horse rise or Porsche's re-entry to the sport as a threat?
WU: I have to say the Toyota guys have been very strong last year, especially from the team level. So they are really on the level that we know that they are strong competitors. The Porsche guys, for sure, they have been taking many good people from different areas and they have more or less one year to build up a strong team that works nicely together, and we will see at the races how that works out, because there they have no experience.
C/D: Does Porsche's racing competition strengthen or divide the VW Group?
WU: To run with different concepts in the same race makes sense, because it's pushing each other to become stronger and to give 110 percent and at the end it lifts the level of both. And that's one of the ideas why two brains from the same family competing in such a race may make sense, because it is pushing both brains to try and improve, and this should give us more strength compared to the other guys.
C/D: How open is the channel of communication and development between Audi and Audi Sport? "
WU: It is completely open. Motorsport is a part of the road-car development area, and therefore there is nothing that limits us, nothing that restricts us. We try to use whatever makes sense from what they have done, and they use our ideas, and what we learn with ideas that they maybe started with and we brought them quickly into the race car, and out of that we learn a lot. It's a give and take in both directions, and it's worked well for quite a long time, and I think this is a special situation for Audi Sport to be in. There aren't that many companies that have their motorsport department as a part of road-car development.
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C/D: Do you think the link between motorsports and road-car development is stronger in sports-car racing than it is in F1?
WU: I think the link there is much more intense, and we could bring technologies that would be impossible to bring into other motorsports. F1 was in the position that they had to find something new, because they missed completely their link to what is road-car development. They have taken that step now, but there's no question I think the sports car is still ahead in this direction.
Because, what is Le Mans? You race on one weekend a full F1 season, from the mileage, and from more or less the time, but you do it with one in the same car and we change the drivers and the tires, and the race runs. In F1, you have every race weekend and after one-and-a-half hours of racing, you re-do the stuff, rebuild the stuff, and it's a completely different approach.
C/D: Do you see that link as an attraction for manufacturers?
WU: It looks as if the new rules would be a good reason for other manufacturers to get into sports-car racing. Other manufacturers are welcome, they can prove things they can't prove in any other motorsports.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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