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- Gallery: Audi in Motorsport

Audi is all-too aware that is name has never been synonymous with motorsport in the way that, say, Porsche has been. It has dipped in and out of racing over the last 70 years, but, at last, it is now establishing its name as a top-rank racing competitor.

Audi in Motorsport

Audi motorsport cars

Audis actually did have success right from its origin in 1910 (the current centenary is of Horch, one of the four companies represented by Audi's four-ring logo) in Alpine trials. However, Audi was generally seen as a relatively staid upper-middle brand that won races thanks to reliability rather than outright performance. That changed in the 1930s, when the insanely powerful (500 bhp plus) Auto Union Silver Arrows competed in Grand Prix racing. A streamlined version of this car was the first to record a speed on 400 km/h (248 mph) on a closed section of public road.

After the war, Auto Union (the then parent company of Audi) was concerned only with survival. Its little DKW two-stroke cars had class wins in rallying, but with 40 bhp, they were no-one's idea of a performance car. When VW took over in 1964 and consolidated DKW, Auto Union and Audi into one brand, the company was only concerned with establishing itself as a semi-premium marque, in between VW and Mercedes. However, all that changed in 1977 when an engineer called Jorg Bensinger had the idea of fitting the four-wheel drive system from the VW Iltis military vehicle to an Audi 80. The result was the Audi Quattro which became an all-conquering rally car and icon of the 1980s. However, the benefit to the rest of the Audi range was limited as there was no other genuinely sporting model in the range - the Audi 80 and Audi 100 were still seen as less dynamic than a BMW by the public.

At the start of this decade, Audi turned its attention to Le Mans - after all Le Mans had helped build the reputation of Porsche. It has gone on the win every Le Mans since 2000, except the one year Bentley was allowed to re-body an Audi R8 and claim victory. In 2008, Audi also won the German Touring Car Championship and the American Le Mans Series, giving the company its best motorsports year ever. Unlike the wins of the 1980s, these victories do help the company's overall image. With the supercar R8 in production and plenty of high-performance road cars like the RS4 and RS6, Audi now looks like a genuine performance brand that naturally goes racing, rather than a car manufacturer that has a racing team tacked on. It has taken a long time, but Audi Sport is finally giving a genuine boost to Audi road cars.

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