Audi in hot water for ‘harming image’ of series

RALLY RAIDS

Audi could face a fine of up to €750,000 for bringing an abrupt end to its World Rally-raid Championship campaign after winning the Dakar Rally with Carlos Sainz.

The German manufacturer was due to see out its third and final season in the Fia-sanctioned series as part of its muchtouted cross-country programme with the RS Q e-tron hybrid. But just a month after scoring a maiden Dakar win in January, Audi announced that it would be shutting down the project with immediate effect, leaving it out of the remaining four events.

Stewards at the recent Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, round two of the World Rally-raid (W2RC) schedule, noted that Audi had registered as a manufacturer for the season and that it was ‘harming the image’ of the series by skipping events. As such, they decided “to impose a fine penalty of €750,000 on the manufacturer Team Audi Sport of which the amount of €562,500 is applied with suspension of sentence subject to no further similar infringement during the 2024 FIA World Rally-raid Championship.”

Given Audi has already made it clear that it does not intend to rejoin the championship later in the year, it would have to pay the entire fine.

An Audi spokesman told Autosport sister title Motorsport-total.com: “We are appealing and will not comment further on the matter as it is an ongoing procedure.”

Audi had put the termination of its W2RC programme down to a lack of spare parts, with lead times for some components as long as two years, and it burning through more than it had expected during the past two editions of the Dakar Rally.

The 2024 Dakar victory for former World Rally champion Sainz, the father of the Ferrari Formula 1 star, appears to have been Audi’s last event on an official basis in motorsport before it joins the Formula 1 grid in 2026 with its takeover of Sauber.