Audi geared up its staff, its motorists and its cars and trucks for the 2022 version of the Dakar Rally by carrying out a sequence of tests in the Moroccan desert. Powered by a gasoline-electric powered powertrain, the RS Q E-Tron sprinted, braked hard, drifted and used a large amount of time in the air.
Dakar legends Stéphane Peterhansel and Carlos Sainz and extensive-time touring motor vehicle racer Mattias Ekström took turns putting an RS Q E-Tron prototype by its paces in Morocco. Sand storms and 100-moreover-diploma temperatures tortured the powertrain it really is the desert, right after all. Not all the things went smoothly, which is inevitable, but the group would fairly explore difficulties while screening than while racing.
“Some new difficulties arose in the substantial temperatures, which regularly prompted interruptions to the screening and required to be solved prior to the next check,” spelled out Sven Quandt, the group principal of Q Motorsport. All instructed, the group used two months south of the Mediterranean.
It appears like a great deal of the screening hovered about the powertrain, which consists of a TFSI motor sourced from Audi’s now-shuttered DTM touring motor vehicle group and set up to charge a fifty-kilowatt-hour battery pack on-the-go. It operates in between 4,five hundred and six,000 rpm. Electrical energy reaches the 4 wheels via a pair of electric powered motors borrowed from Audi’s Method E cars and trucks, while a third motor assists charge the battery. It is a relatively complex technique some of the parts are off-the-shelf elements, but the battery was developed particularly for the RS Q E-Tron.
One more spot that was wonderful-tuned for the duration of the tests is ergonomics. Race cars and trucks are created for performance, not convenience, but quirks like an odd seating position, weak visibility, and a cramped cabin can trigger the motorists and the copilot to drop cherished seconds. Audi therefore manufactured smaller but major modifications to the cockpit to carve out extra area for the crew and permit for far better conversation.
“The insights we received in Morocco is priceless, but they also demonstrate us that we still have a large amount to do prior to the Dakar Rally, and there is not a great deal time still left,” concluded Andreas Roos, the head of manufacturing facility motorsport jobs at Audi Activity. He’s proper: the race commences in January 2022.
Audi Activity will continue on screening the RS Q E-Tron in a selection of disorders and places in the coming months. In the meantime, workers at its facility in Germany have begun developing 1 of the two cars and trucks that will contend in the race. It wears chassis quantity 104. Lovers will be able to see the duo in action for the duration of the 2022 Dakar Rally, which commences in commences on January two in Hail, Saudi Arabia, and ends in Jeddah twelve days afterwards. In the dunes, the RS Q E-Tron will have to have to fend off competitors from a assorted checklist of competition which includes the BRX Hunter.
Curiously, some of the lessons figured out while screening the Dakar racer in Morocco and elsewhere will trickle down to manufacturing cars and trucks in the coming decades. Audi is notably getting important knowledge about controlling a substantial-voltage battery pack’s temperature in excessive disorders.
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