Audi improves the RS Q e-tron once again: Ahead of its third outing in the Dakar Rally, the rally prototype with its pioneering electric drivetrain with a high-voltage battery and an energy converter receives innovations in many areas. The Audi driver crews of Mattias Ekström/Emil Bergkvist, Stéphane Peterhansel/Edouard Boulanger and Carlos Sainz/Lucas Cruz benefits from numerous detail improvements in January 2024. The new ideas make the RS Q e-tron safer, more reliable, more comfortable and a little lighter, as well as having shorter maintenance times for the team.
Category
🚗
MotorTranscript
00:00 Hello everyone, I'm Leonardo Pasquali, I'm the Technical Director of the Audi Dakar Project
00:06 and today I'm going to explain you all the improvements that we brought in this car.
00:14 The first part that I'd like to explain to you is the front crash box. This is a major change that
00:30 we made this year. So with this part, changing the design but making the parts also slightly
00:37 lighter, we were able to increase four times the energy absorption in case of a front crash.
00:44 This is the crash box, it comes here behind this part. So here we have the front bonnet,
00:53 so the design didn't change a lot. So what we made, we put some lube here in order to avoid that
01:02 dust and water goes on the windscreen to allow a better visibility for the drivers. We also modified
01:09 the upright and the brake calipers. The main reason for that was to improve the distance between the
01:19 rims and the calipers upright to avoid that stones can be stuck between the two parts and
01:26 generate the major damage on the rims. We also changed completely the design of this part
01:32 and you see that we do not have anymore the mudflap, both front and rear. Another big change
01:41 that we made was the spare wheel cover. Here it's again lighter and easy to disassemble
01:48 and in particular here we have a small part but we changed the pin. Now we have two holes to all of
01:54 the crew and they need to change the tires during a stage so that they can easily assemble again the
02:02 spare wheel. Also the rear bonnet, we changed here more the design because here you can see that
02:10 it's completely free and also we worked a lot to improve the weight and you can see that this
02:16 visibility is lighter compared to the one that we had last year. Here we also deleted the duct
02:24 for the fan because it's just weight, nothing that could improve the heat management in this bay.
02:34 Of course we worked a lot on the damper spring setup all over the year. We also worked a lot
02:44 on the torque management so we changed the setup of the differential locking front and rear axle
02:52 to be better integrated with the additional power that we have this year. This year compared to last
02:58 year we will have 15 kilowatt more so with this car we hope that we will be even more competitive
03:07 compared to last year to reach a really good result with the car.