Audi Wins Macau GT Race Upside Down

Winning a race is hard. There are surprisingly few drivers who can even lay claim to winning a top-level professional race, and nearly none can say that they’ve won a race from the roof of their car, but following this weekend’s FIA GT Race at Macau, Laurens Vanthoor managed to win upside down.

The Macau leg of the FIA GT series was weird race all over, in which only four laps were run. The day started well, though, for Vanthoor who took off from first place on the starting grid.

After an accident involving an understeering Mercedes and a barrier, which, surprisingly, the Mercedes won, the race had to be stopped so that crews could fix the wall.

It took the race team a while to fix the wall, but eventually the race was ready to restart. It wasn’t long, though, before Vanthoor was overtaken by a Porsche. On the subsequent corner, Vanthoor ran over the inner curb, which unsettled the car, sending him oversteering into the outside wall at the corner exit.

Vanthoor’s R8 LMS tried to climb the wall, but was rebuffed, and eventually did a back flip to register its displeasure. A few hundred feet down the track, the R8, now on its roof, ground to a stop and Vanthoor got out unharmed.

Because of how long it took to repair the wall after the first crash earlier in the race, organizers had no choice but to red flag the race and declare the leader of the last completed lap—Vanthoor—the winner.

Predictably, Vanthoor wasn’t exactly jubilant on the podium.

“I’m happy and relieved about not having been injured,” said Vanthoor. “I made a mistake and caused an accident, and won nonetheless. I’m still not quite sure about how to rate this victory.”

Audi Sport’s head of customer racing, on the other hand, saw the silver lining.

“The most important thing for us is that Laurens [Vanthoor] is okay,” said Reinke. “This shows how safe our cars are. It’s arguably a little strange to win this way. It was a very intensive race. Fortune and misfortune always play a role in Macau, but one of the prerequisites for success was the fact that we were in contention for the top spot in all sessions. That’s why I’m happy about the title in the FIA GT World Cup.”

This story first appeared on fourtitude.com

The post Audi Wins Macau GT Race Upside Down appeared first on VWVortex.

from VWVortex http://ift.tt/2geQWVP
via IFTTT

Comments

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier. The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow. While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something . To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it. Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait. So with this in mind, we lined our G...

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers. The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience. So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf. In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...

Vorderman Volkswagen

Search This Blog