Collection Gift Guide: The Tourist Trophy Tribute
December 1, 2006
David Hobbs, blunt but avuncular Speed Channel commentator and 20-start
Le Mans driver, was voicing a breakfast prediction for this year’s brutal 24 hours of manic and
insomniac motorsports.
“It will be an interesting race,” he said over cornflakes at the Marine
Hotel, many kilometers removed from the circuit and its rowdy cars, yet still within
earshot of all the thunder. “I think the diesels will disappear. This is Audi’s day.”
A perfect forecast. Audi’s 650 hp R10 TDI racecar, pulled by a bi-turbo V-12
diesel, began its disappearing act from the first lap and scored the German company’s sixth
Le Mans win in seven starts—seven straight, if one is mischievous enough to include the 2003
victory by a Bentley armed with an Audi engine.
The Audi R10 is the first diesel to win at Le Mans. The car completed more
laps (380) than any other entry in the 83-year history of the race. It was quick, fast,
economical, clean, durable, and exuded no greasy contrails. And as a marketing exercise in the
VW-Audi offensive to get the Americas to accept oil burners, the triumph was clear,
even clean, proof that diesels are no longer slow, smoking, smelly, filthy power sources
unfit for anything but Blue Bird school buses.
The second part of Hobbs’ prediction was fractionally off center. In truth,
it has been Audi’s day for several years now.
Offerings from Ingolstadt have become full range, a large catalog of models
covering all automotive segments. Audi is well on its way to a 2006 annual sales total of
more than 800,000 units, which has started to straighten the smiles at BMW. Audi’s
reputation as the premium car arm of parent Volkswagen is a given, if only for interiors that,
for luxury and elegance, innovation, and exclusivity of style and materials, are pretty much
Relais & Châteaux.
The consistent, best supporting novelty starlet of the lot, at least since
its 1999 introduction, has been the Audi TT—now poised to enter its second generation
as a batch of redesigned, restyled, reengineered TT coupes and roadsters for 2008.
This tangle of two-doors—with our affections held by the well-tested 250 hp
V-6 (at a projected $52,000) with the equally time-proven Quattro all-wheel drive—are
edgier, larger, and nowhere near as fluffy, and will offer a serious performance challenge to
Porsche’s Cayman, Z4s from BMW, the Mercedes-Benz SLK, and similar pocket projectiles.
Audi acknowledges that the Cayman was its target. And automotive journals are
already comparison-testing the TT versus the Cayman and Z4.
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