Perspectives on Audi’s, and one Audi’s, place in sportscar history
AUDI R8: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF R8-405
RRP £69
This was the year that Audi was meant to make its return to the pinnacle of the sportscar racing. But its LMDH programme was canned before the car put its wheels on the race track. Funny, then, that now two books should appear about the German manufacturer’s successes at the Le Mans 24 Hours and beyond.
Works on other great sports-racing cars, Porsche’s 917 and its 956/962 Group C and IMSA GTP design among them, are two a penny. Yet Audi’s line of ultra-successful prototypes, which won Le Mans no fewer than 13 times, has been largely ignored. That has been put right to some extent with the publication of Ian Wagstaff’s
Audi R8: The Autobiography of R8-405 and Audi at Le Mans by Lars Krone and Alexander von Wegner.
Neither of these two very different works are what the sportscar world has been waiting for, however. Wagstaff’s contribution, which follows his modest 2011 work on the R8 in Veloce’s WSC
Greats series, is one of Porter Press’s run of ‘Great Car’ books focused on a particular chassis (with a financial contribution from the owner thereof ). Krone and von Wagner cover the full scope of Audi’s prototype programme from the R8R and R8C that took it to Le Mans for the first time in 1999 through the all-conquering R8 and on to the various turbodiesels to bear the R18 name that took the marque up to its hasty departure from the LMP1 division at the end of 2016. It is, however, a semi-official work in the Audi Tradition series; Krone and von Wegner work for the Speedpool communications agency that has a long-standing involvement in
Audi’s motorsport programmes.
Wagstaff’s book offers little insight into the gestation of the R8, just 12 pages to be precise. But just in case you’d forgotten what was happening at the turn of the new millennium when the R8 was beginning its competition career, there are six pages on the events in the real world (think George W Bush and Dr Harold Shipman) and other sporting realms (Sir Steve Redgrave and Tiger Woods).
You do get a detailed history of #405’s competition history, from its second place on debut at Le Mans in 2000 with Allan Mcnish, Stephane Ortelli and Laurent Aiello through its campaign with Emanuele Pirro and Frank Biela in the second half of that year’s American Le Mans Series, before it became the first R8 to be fielded by Champion Racing the following season. Even so its career is done and dusted by the time the book is just over halfway done.