The Audi R15 is a forgotten car in Audi's Legendary LMP Program 

One of the coolest diesel burners in motorsport; right up their with the Peugeot 908 HDi's.

@@legoferrari14 The last (ever, most likely) car to win Le Mans as well

Yup absolute distance record at Le Mans (397 laps)

This is the comment I was looking for. Thank you.

I was going to say that, but I thought I'd check the comments first.... "Hook-a-Duck". He's a bloody Philistine, but we love him really.

You beat me to it 🙂

Yes, it's.

There's one more left

And not even close to being the first... Audi had years of experience of the V12 and millions upon hundreds of millions of Euros spent on the R10 and R15 programmes; including with the electronics and gearbox partners (Ricardo, notably); but then again they WERE trying to convince people that sports cars and fast road cars could - and should be diesel-powered. 'Clean', economical, high torque, quiet, fast: it was all a huge marketing exercise to push the diesel as THE future of road cars, through racing as a marketing tool. Earlier however; RIcardo Engineering were contracted for a rather similar, yet very different TDV10 Le Mans racer. Another team, Taurus Sports, saw the potential of the fuel economy of the Diesel option (which after Audi's first wins, never happened because the tank sizes were reduced to they couldn't run further than a petrol car); and requested a V10 TDI from VW for development into a Le Mans racer; they intended to take the Touareg engines, with money and engineering from Caterpillar (particularly for mapping and electronics) and Mountune; and develop torquey, efficient, powerful - PRIVATEER - Le Mans cars, in a Lola B2K/10 chassis. VW, of course, said no. They had won the LMP675 class with a 4-cyl petrol in 2001, not won in 2002, and then pulled their funding (not to mention also having the works Bentley team and semi-works Audis there!). Taurus instead went to their local VW dealers; bought, outright, two Touaregs off the forecourt; and pulled the engines out and sent them to Mountune to be bored, honed and treated, to be made race-ready. The engines were spectacular, JUST completed on time, and then fitted with mechanical fuel injection, turbos, Hewland gearbox and accessories, and installed in time for Silverstone. Per the team boss "On the dyno we’ve seen torque figures of up to 1200Nm, which is far in excess of what a standard racing transmission can handle. At Le Mans we ran the engine with just over 1000Nm of torque and about 530bhp.” Their issue was the clutch; “The Hewland gearbox ratios available as standard are too long for use with diesel engine. That creates problems getting the car out of the pits from standstill and puts a heavy load on the clutch, as it slips a lot. Having said that the clutch problems we had at Le Mans have already been resolved. AP Racing has built us a new carbon clutch rated at 1700Nm and is working on another rated at 2200Nm". The problems never were solved though...until Audi and Peugeot threw bulk cash at the problem; something Taurus Sports could not afford to do, once their (limited) sponsorship ran dry.

Yeah sorry about that. Next episode makes up for it!

Jessa Phillips If anything was obliterated, was the Peugeot's conrods the next year again this very car (the R15+). The original R15 Jay keeps cutting to did take a shellacking from Peugeot, but it had undercooked aerodynamics that Audi fixed on the Plus.

yes

you're objectively wrong

Uhhh no. We DO care about these kind of cars as petrolheads.

@@AntoniusTyas Sure we do, that's why it's forgotten. I'll wager 100% of people care more about the car in their driveways than they do about this car. I'll also bet that if you took the Audi Rings and markings off it, you wouldn't even know who made it. But whatever, outside of a very few circles, nobody really cares, and even in those select circles they care more about what's out there now and what's going on today than this car.

@@jamie49868 You said "cars like these" you're saying nobody cares about race cars. As this is a race car, you can wager whatever you want but the fact of the matter is the claim you made was that people do not care about race cars when that isn't true.

@@jamie49868 eeuu.no.not at all.if you really need to learn about generic cars,get some magazines,or go to a dealer .racecars like this one,we need some like Jay so we can actually learn about'em,which are much more interesting than your corolla or my altima..