Press release
168KB
october 19, 2021 - Audi
Stéphane Peterhansel: "Enormous driving pleasure"
With 14 victories under his belt, #stephanepeterhansel, who made his debut in the Dakar Rally in 1988, is the sole record holder of the famous desert rally. Before his 34th start at the iconic off-road #Event and his first one with the Audi brand, the Frenchman provides insights into the preparation.
Audi is a brand with a great motorsport tradition. From the rally days with the quattro in the nineteen-eighties to today, the four rings have stood for pioneering achievements in motorsport. What does it mean to you to drive the Dakar Rally for Audi for the first time?
I’m a big fan not only of off-road endurance rallying but follow many other motorsport disciplines as well. As far back as in the days of Group B, I admired Audi in rally #racing. I’m really proud to be part of the lineup now. There’s one thing that has always distinguished Audi: no matter where the rally and race cars competed, they were always in contention for victory and that is still the case today.
You’re into the fourth decade of your career now and have been involved in a large number of developments. What would you have thought if someone had predicted to you back then that you’d contest the Dakar some day with an electric powertrain using an energy converter?
Arguably, I’d have hardly believed it. And the best thing following our tests so far is that this powertrain makes for enormous driving pleasure that I’d hardly have thought to be possible. Consequently, this idea paves the way for electric powertrains becoming increasingly popular also in everyday driving. In the RS Q e-tron, a massive amount of power and torque are available to us at any point in time. No car using a classic powertrain with an internal combustion engine can deliver such performance. Because there’s no transmission and I don’t have to shift gears I can fully focus on cross-country steering. The acoustics are still unusual for me. Unlike an IC engine, the energy converter with its rotational speeds and its noise development does not follow the commands of the accelerator pedal directly.
As a driver, you have to feel comfortable and content in the car. What advice did you provide to Audi’s engineering team during the development?
Audi is intimately familiar with electric powertrains due to its previous projects, be it with hybrid drive at Le Mans or battery-electric drive in Formula E. We drivers know exactly what demands the Dakar Rally makes on the chassis, the wheel suspensions and other components. Aside from many detailed ideas that were fed into the development, our general advice was that reliability matters more than the final tenths of a second.
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