Audi R18

Among the 170 Audi AG entries in the MotorJury library, the Audi R18 holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

The record does not fix a firm introduction year for the Audi R18, which is itself informative: cars without a clean launch date are usually prototypes, coachbuilt specials, or models whose history was written down long after the fact. The catalogue keeps them anyway, because the odd corners of the record are where the interesting machines hide.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Audi R18 reads like this: the record lists its engine as diesel engine; quoted output is 514 + with MGU push-to-pass boost (402 hp MGU push-to-pass boost for Le Mans 24 hours only); kerb weight is recorded at 900 kg / 2013: 915 kg / 2014: 875 kg. Worked together, those figures give roughly 571 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Audi AG story

Within Audi AG's own catalogue the Audi R18 sits alongside the Audi 100 C2, the Audi 100 C3, the Audi 100 C4, the Audi 200. The record names the Audi R15 TDI as its predecessor and the Designer = Christopher Reinke (Technical Project Leader) / Wolfgang Appel (Head of Vehicle Development) / Martin Mühlmeier (Head of Technology) / Ulrich Baretzky (Head of Engine De as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Christopher Reinke (Technical Project Leader) / Wolfgang Appel (Head of Vehicle Development) / Martin Mühlmeier (Head of Technology) / Ulrich Baretzky (Head of Engine Development).

On the record

The Audi R18 also has a competition record: 18 recorded wins from 47 starts and 2 (2012 FIA WEC, 2013 FIA WEC) championships. A race history changes how a car should be valued — competition machines appreciate on provenance, not depreciation curves.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Audi R18 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.