Audi R18 Review

Ok, so last week you guys will remember that I did say I was going to do a review on my first R1 car. I was all excited while typing this up because it's something I always really wanted to do. So why waste time? Lets get started.

Now after debating for a whole 3 mins on what car I wanted to review last week. I decided to go with in my opinion the king of the LMP car, Audi. And decided to go with their latest Peugeot beating masterpiece.



The Audi R18 is the latest Le Mans Prototype(LMP) car from Audi that is destined to run in such series as the FIA World Endurance Championship, International Le Mans Cup and the American Le Man Series. Unlike the last 3 prototypes from Audi, this car is a closed cockpit car, which is the first closed cockpit car since the R8C in 1999. Originally they weren't going to race the R8C because they had their original plans to race the R8R, which is the open cockpit version of the R8C, but with them decided to change the rules for the 1999 24 Hour of Le Mans, Audi decided to do an entirely new design, little did they know that this car would begin one of the most dominant era's in Le Mans History as every version of the Le Mans Prototype from the R8 to the R15 has won at least 1 24 hours of Le Mans, and the R18 kept this tradition alive when it won the 24 hours of Le Mans this past year in 2011. It was Audi's 10th win in a 13 year span.

The Audi R18 is not the usual twin turbo V10 that they had put in their cars, this time Audi decided to go with a 3.6 Liter Twin Turbo V6 which produces 540 Horsepower, but since its a V6 and not a V10, the car is alot lighter than its predecessors. The new regulations also now include all LMP cars to have a fin over the engine cover for improved stability, it also helps with the stability and toughness of the car as it is 1 giant piece of car and not 2 pieces. Which was proven vital in 2011 during the Le Mans race when both Alan McNish and Mike Rockenfeller violently crashed the #3 and #1 Audi respectively with both men walking away under their own power(Rockenfeller was taken to the hospital for further evaluation). But the car proved its dominance as the #2 car of Marcel Fässler, André Lotterer and Benoît Treluyer went on to win the race by 13.854 seconds.

Now to the car in the game, it is available 1 way and 1 way only and that is the American Le Mans series car pack which was released last week. The car cost a very cool 2.5 Million Dollars(but if you wanna wait, that is the prize car for just entering the King of the Track Challenge for this month). So lets being like we always do with the "stats' and "goodstuff" of the car as you look at it in the Audi showroom


As you can see, the R18 doesn't really have the top speed that the other's do as it only has a 8.9 Speed. But with the stabilizing fin the car is so much better at cornering and the whole car as a whole is much better than the R8-R15. Driving the car around my test tracks made me feel just how much grip the car truly had, I could throw the car 5-8 miles per hour faster into a corner than the R15 and the car would just stick to the ground like glue. Now the "Things to Tackle" and "Upgrades" aren't going to be here this week because there are really 1 thing I could do and that is just remove restrictors(unless you count rims) and the car is so balanced and stable there wasn't really anything I could think of to make the car better. So I took the car into the upgrade shop, did its whole 2 upgrades and here are now the goodstuff for and stats for the car....Bobbo-Fied!!!.


So the only major things that increased was the horsepower, torque and speed rating all went up a considerable amount, the car dropped 4 pounds from the restrictors. So the car was exactly the same as it was before I took the restictors off, just faster. So I decided to take the car into the tune setup and went to work.

Now, I couldn't think of what I really wanted to with this car, but then I had an idea and remembered that this will be my car for AngelKristensen's FIA Virtual World Endurance Championship. So I got ahold of my teammate for this series and good friend awareofnow and he decided to help me out with a tune, so after a day or so of him tinkering with the car(because he loves to tune). He gave me a tune that we will drive in the first race or so in the VWEC and the car was just amazing, I don't know 100% what Adam did to the car(he confuses me when talks about tuning) but the result was arguably the best car I ever driven for the R1 class. It shattered essentially every lap time that I did on my test tracks and posting top 1000 and Top 500 times on tracks like Road America, Catalunya etc etc. So the laptimes were.


All of those laptimes are either top 500 or top 1000 times on the leaderboards. I absolutely love this tune, so in conclusion. This car is absolutely amazing and is clearly my favorite R1 class. This is the car that myself and awareofnow will be driving in the VWEC and I really hope I myself get some wins in that series.

Well, thats all for this week, tune in next week for more!!!

cant wait to compete against this car, great pics and paint job, my only criticism is that sometimes you seem to repeat the same points.

otherwise a great writeup worthy of a read

nice write up bobbo .

I didn't realize that the fin was a required element for the new design.

Nice write-up and nice LB placement : )

I stumbled across this and thought it might interest you, it explains the back fin fairly good: http://www.alms.com/articles/dont-flip-out-prototype-design-rules

Would it also be possible to send me a copy of your tune and paint? I liked it a lot and now they'll be sending an R18 soon I'd like to drive it again.