Audi was key with a pioneering engineering prototype launched more than thirty years ago. The story involves the Volkswagen Group and culminates with Bugatti. Image gallery.
The Bugatti Veyron with all its technical specifications was not born because it was, nor was it a sudden work of the French brand. The origin of the model and the precedent it set with its engine created based on two eight-cylinder V-blocks has its explanation. To get to a model like the Veyron you have to knock on the door of the Volkswagen Group.
Let’s go back some fourteen years from 2005, when the Bugatti supercar was launched, and start from 1991, the key year to understand why audimeanwhile Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin and other exponent manufacturers of supercars, it was so decisive for the history of these high-performance vehicles.
There is no doubt that the R8 ten-cylinder is the model that represented and continues to represent the four German rings in the 21st century with its two generations. However, in the early 1990s it was another Audi that surprised as an automotive precursor to a not very developed mechanical formula at that time.
The Tokyo Motor Show ’91 was the event in which the Volkswagen Group presented to the world a pioneering prototype in engineering: the Audi Avus Quattro. Designed on the basis of an aluminum bodywork, this concept had in its central axis the now consecrated W12 enginecreated with two six cylinders facing each other and in view from a zenithal plane.
The Avus Quattro W12 6.0 numbers speak for themselves: 509 horsepower, top speed over 300 km/h and acceleration from 0 to 100 in less than three seconds. Beyond its performance, some curiosities are known about this engine, such as the one that supposes that the model exhibited in Tokyo did not have the W12 inside it because it was still in the development phase.
The legacy of the Avus Quattro
The Avus Quattro was a trigger for the immediate future of Audi if we take into account the launch of the A8 in 1994 with the W12 as one of the gasoline blocks with which it was equipped. But it was above all a starting point for the Group, which continued to experiment with prototypes between 1997 and 2001.
In those four years a range of three concepts called Volkswagen W12a non-production project based on the same engine and a similar if not identical design -stretched rear axle, scissor doors, visible W12 and covered by a glass roof- continued the Avus Quattro legacy and paved the way to the Veyron.
Today, the Avus Quattro presented in Tokyo is in the museum that Audi exhibits in Ingolstadt. With so much series range eclipsing its history, it would not have been fair to omit its existence and how decisive it was for the Volkswagen Group to bring the W engine formula to production years later with the 16-cylinder Bugatti. Would you have liked the Avus to go into production?