audi

When Le Mans Racecars Fly

Should sports-car racing's top dogs be grounded for safety?


The run-up to the annual 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race is always a nail-biting enterprise for race teams. Naturally, techs are most concerned with assuring cars' ability to sustain the day-night race, which is the ultimate test for GT cars and sportscar prototypes that will wind through the Circuit of the Sarthe -- on a combination of racetrack and public roads -- in Le Mans, Sarthe, France. This year there's an added kink keeping teams up nights. It appears the gods of aerodynamics have been sending LeMans prototype-class racecars into the ether with a cosmic finger flick.

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Test Drive

Poise and Luxury on the Track

The freshened 2009 Audi A4 brings smart tuning and luxury touches to the table to compete with genre stalwarts BMW and Lexus

Audi A4 '09 On the Track: Photo by Audi
The business of cars, like that of pop music, is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately proposition. Take Audi, which has moved scores of A4s since the mid-1990s. Like any other automotive hitmaker, every so often it must turn out a fresh one that reads like a John Grisham novel, a force multiplier that reacts to trends and keeps things moving forward. This can get tricky, as Ford found out when it tried to update the popular Taurus in 1996 and wound up, as Britney Spears did with Britney (the one where she tried to write her own songs), on the losing end of a pivotal moment.

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Diesel Wins Respect

Think diesel is stinky and slow? This history-making 220mph racecar aims to prove you wrong. Click inside for video

See a cool promotional video put together by Audi, featuring a time-lapse construction of the R10 TDI. Click here

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