Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Volume 7 of B.H. Magazine; order your copy now.
It’s February, and here in Morocco, it’s cold. In the fading light at the Circuit Moulay El Hassan, a tight and technical stretch of bitumen on the outskirts of Marrakesh, dust sweeps in from the Agafay Desert, while rays glint off four-ringed metal.
It would be wistful if not for the sound of rubber under protest: that’s crack Audi engineer Roland Waschkau fully sideways in the unreleased RS5 Avant hybrid. If there is silence, it’s because a tyre has surrendered.
I’m here with B.H., one of a select few invited to the foot of the Atlas Mountains to sample a final pre-production version of this year’s RS5 – Ingolstadt’s effort to keep six-cylinder power alive.
The last decade saw the Audi Sport division bid farewell to its V10-powered R8 supercar while welcoming powerful performance EVs. But customers – if not European politicians – still want to keep combustion alive for longer.
The RS5’s hybrid tech might just please both camps. Wealthy buyers, demanding faster and louder combustion cars just as regulations tighten, are thumbing their noses at CO₂ bureaucrats – and Audi still wants their business.
The brand promises to build its most engaging RS cars yet over the next three years, part of a comprehensive plan to lock horns with AMG and BMW M, attempting to break free from being the ‘third-mentioned’ name on any list of German metal. But it isn’t just Audi’s leap into hybrid power we’re here to chew on.
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Brewing 17,000 kilometres away in Melbourne is another eye-popping line item on Audi’s balance sheet. After years of participation – and success – in cult motorsport categories like endurance and rally, Audi has redirected all of its racing efforts and budget into F1.
Going racing on the big stage of motorsport before nearly a billion people, while future-proofing the combustion sports cars customers actually want to buy, are two sides of the same coin, according to Audi Sport boss Rolf Michl. Selling cars is the name of the game.
The carving away of a separate Audi Motorsport division to run the F1 effort has insulated Michl’s skunkworks from bleeding too much cash and brainpower. But the attention and spend focused on building the F1 campaign – plus the obligation on Audi Sport to thread the needle on CO₂ results for road cars – means things are busier than ever.
Fortunately for Michl, the man with whom the buck stops is Dr Gernot Döllner. The global head of Audi is three years into the task of radically reshaping how the brand gets ideas to the road, and he’s a rare combination of numbers man and genuine enthusiast. Previously, Döllner ran Porsche’s venerated 918 Spyder hypercar program.
Having flown into Morocco from Munich on a red-eye just hours earlier, Döllner rides shotgun with B.H. over the N7 pass, up and over the Atlas Mountains. This is how the man likes to be interviewed: the journalist at the wheel, Döllner in the passenger seat, and gun comms boss Carolin Strunz in the back, adding the occasional detail.
A Volkswagen Group lifer, Döllner wants Audi to survive. He sees the asteroid of Chinese competition coming for legacy brands and knows costly manoeuvres are needed to innovate out of its path. That means redoubling efforts to strengthen Audi’s premium visage – building cars that drive better than ever and creating events people want to be part of. Think: F1.
“We have three pillars [for measuring the ROI of F1]: the earnings and profitability of the team, supported by a clear business plan; we measure the value of the team; and vehicle sales,” explains Döllner.
F1 may be a pleasant distraction for the power team running Audi, but its main focus is turning the aircraft carrier around – preparing for a tough battle in the years ahead against emerging Chinese luxury car brands such as Denza and Zeekr, which are establishing themselves in Australia and are poised to enter European markets as trade barriers fall.
Döllner’s approach has been to kick any residual arrogance to the curb while watching and learning from Chinese competitors. A joint venture with SAIC (the owner of MG) has seen China-specific models, badged A-U-D-I, find success across the region.
Tough lessons from China are flowing into Audi’s processes in Europe. Döllner says the brand must adopt what he calls “China speed” in vehicle development, where existing platforms can spawn production of an all-new model in just two years from his sign-off – way faster than the typical five to seven-year lag.
With Volkswagen on the cusp of finalising a next-gen platform to underpin everything from the new Golf to Scout Motors’ rugged 4WDs, Döllner hopes Audi will be able to outmanoeuvre Benz and BMW while going toe-to-toe on speed to market with Chinese rivals.
Accelerating to “China speed” has meant abolishing stuffy committees in favour of hyper-focused “project houses” for new models, co-locating design, engineering, and validation under one roof, with permission to approach Döllner and the board for a speedy yes-or-no. Decisions that once took months now take hours.
Döllner stepped into the top job too late for the new RS5 to benefit from a project house, but he says the first test case will be the production version of the Concept C – a svelte electric cabrio sharing parts with the next Porsche Boxster. Debuted as a show car in late 2025, the TT replacement of sorts will be on sale by the end of next year.
Audi bosses might be copying China’s homework to boost flagging European productivity, but the learnings go both ways: Chinese rival BYD is now exploring an F1 entry of its own.
Any doubt that F1 is motorsport’s premier category has faded in recent years. For carmakers, it remains an expensive but tantalising marketing tool, thanks to growing audience numbers and a more diverse fanbase – in part driven by the Netflix series Drive to Survive, which has brought celebrity status to brands, drivers, and top team personnel.
With Formula One, the audience is fairly balanced between male and female. It’s also a very young audience, making it a project that’s relevant for the long term,” explains Döllner.
Entering F1 feels long overdue. In the past, Audi has enjoyed considerable success in niche motorsports such as the World Endurance Championship (WEC), electric Formula E, the Dakar Rally, and Germany’s beloved DTM series.
“Whenever Audi entered a racing series – and we entered a lot over the past 50 years – success followed,” says Döllner.
People who side-eye Drive to Survive-era F1 fans often harbour a soft spot for WEC. Rusted-on Audi supporters still smart over the exit from endurance racing in 2016, in the wake of Dieselgate, which made the TDI-powered LMP1 car internally unfashionable despite its devastating capability, having banked 13 wins from 18 Le Mans races.
In pulling the rug from WEC, Audi didn’t leave motorsport entirely. Instead, it redirected resources to the then-nascent Formula E, picking up a team championship in the 2017/18 season. With viewership struggling at a reported 31 million in 2019, another departure loomed, and Audi, along with BMW, headed for the exits in 2020/21.
After a COVID hiatus, Audi jumped into the Dakar Rally in 2022 with its range-extender hybrid electric RS Q e-tron battle trucks. The factory effort ran across two initial seasons before Car 204, piloted by Carlos Sainz Sr. and Lucas Cruz, claimed the overall win in 2024 – a victory coming as Audi chose to bow out on a high note, preserving funds for the big F1 push.
With Ingolstadt’s industrial might focused on exotic motorsport categories, Audi could win – but not in front of a large enough audience for it to really matter. WEC, Dakar, DTM: compared with F1, they’re backwaters. Even the 100-million-strong crowd that watched Audi win Le Mans in 2014 pales in comparison to the sport’s top tier.
It’s about capturing shoppers’ attention, claims Döllner. “There is no other racing series with this level of interest… almost a billion people follow every other weekend. It’s not just our Audi Sport or RS customers – many Audi buyers follow what we are doing in Formula One, and future customers too.”
Not everyone is convinced that F1’s popularity will deliver what Audi needs: stronger brand equity, increased foot traffic at dealerships, and ultimately better sales performance in Europe, Asia, and especially North America – a key expansion market for F1 in recent years.
Motorsport bosses at crosstown rival BMW have consistently reaffirmed the Bavarian carmaker’s opinion that F1 powertrain and fuel tech have little relevance to road cars. The same view was shared by former Audi head of motorsport Wolfgang Ullrich at the height of the brand’s WEC success.
“There is a very good reason why we are not in F1,” Ullrich told the press in 2011. “There is no relevance to the road. Audi has always engaged in motorsport that is relevant to our customers, such as rallying and touring cars, which brought Quattro [and turbo petrol engines] to our road cars.”
Have times changed? The data suggests they have. F1’s audience has doubled from the doldrums of 400 million in 2015 to 827 million last year, and the net now includes many more target customers. The proportion of female fans, for example, has quadrupled to 40 percent over the same period, while
more than half of new fans are in their twenties.
It’s still early days in Audi’s inaugural campaign with the R26 constructed in-house. Results – and reliability – have been mixed, with drivers Nico Hülkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto trading failures to start in Melbourne and Shanghai, respectively. Bortoleto’s ninth-place finish in the Victorian race, however, earned the team its first points.
In Döllner’s view, the notion that Audi must win big – and fast – is inaccurate. Insiders suggest that mid-tier results will be sufficient to raise the team’s profile, at least in the early stages.
“We are already benefiting from Formula One. When I look at our Audi team all over the world, F1 has raised the energy to a new level. How successful we are as a brand is independent of our victories. Being successful in F1 will only help even more.
“Sitting in an RS5 [with B.H.] now, we believe F1 will positively influence the success of this vehicle, and others to come,” says Döllner.
In the background of our voice memo, recorded during the drive, are the sounds of the car: a delectably raspy 2.9-litre six; a faint turbocharger whine; and overrun from the enormous twin-oval tailpipes, a key signature of the ‘B10’ RS5, alongside outrageous camouflage-carbon mirror caps, bronze wheels, and eye-wideningly broad hips.
There’s an element of the digital to the soundtrack, but it’s mostly there, mostly real. You could sum up the entirety of the new RS5 experience that way: Audi has stuffed the RS5 with technology to please buyers and regulators alike, yet a years-long process of refining the details gives this modern car a surprisingly – and pleasingly – mechanical feel.
Everyone on the advance drive knows the sabre-toothed ‘G80’ M3 has, until now, set the benchmark for segment dynamics – but the new RS5 runs it close. The mark of a fast Audi is shifting, becoming more palpably rear-driven and less about Quattro surety.
All-wheel drive now only makes its presence known when you’re pushing unbelievably hard. Curiously, the RS5’s lairier, more rear-driven character is only partly due to old-school suspension and steering geometry. It’s mostly a product of the PHEV system, engineered to do far more than simply run the RS5 on electric power for 84 kilometres to drive down the official emissions for reduced carbon taxing.
The engineers took the hybrid system far beyond mere compliance. Sure, in default mode, the RS5 is placid, favouring electric power. But bump a red button on the steering wheel into any RS setting and the V6 roars, then stays awake permanently – not just for max petrol attack but also to keep the hybrid battery topped up to 90%.
That’s the level where the 400-volt system can surge through a mechanical torque-vectoring system on steroids. The Dynamic Torque Control unit can effectively send all available power to a single rear wheel, meaning power oversteer – subtle with ESC on, or wild in destabilised ‘Torque Rear’ mode – is just a heavy foot away.
Combine accessible throttle adjustability with sweetly tuned steering, voracious grip on summer tyres, and a compliant, adaptively damped ride, and the new Audi RS5 offers far greater breadth and bandwidth as a driver’s sedan, or wagon, than previous generations of the literally and metaphorically narrower RS4 or RS5.
If there’s a vice, it’s the weight. Breaking the scales at 2,300 kg before we even jump aboard, the RS5 is a testament to the fact that giving drivers what they want – a big engine at a price unaffected by CO₂ taxes – and regulators what they demand (electric range) requires significant, and heavy, compromises.
Cue the Marrakesh tyre-shredding gymkhana. It’s a violent, point-proving exercise: all that mass moving sideways at speed means the outside tyres last just 45 seconds under duress, enriching Pirelli’s finest at $800 a pop. But it’s now clear that, if you can afford the rubber, this RS5 moves like no midsize Audi before it – and far more like a BMW than ever.
And when it’s standing still, it looks good too: this might be the shapeliest fast sedan, or wagon, that has come along in the last decade. Proportionate in grille, body, and glasshouse, the RS5 is the anti-M3 in many ways, and a thinking person’s everyday sports car – even if the touchscreen-dominated dash has diluted the cabin elegance of Audi’s past.
Product bosses hint that louder F1 special editions might arrive, following a mould long ago set by AMG; but, in terms of taste, we hope for little changes beyond a subtle nod.
This is still Audi. Don’t expect too much more exuberance than the standard-fit chequered-flag headlights… though if the team performs exceptionally well, expect a victory lap or two.