The Audi Skorpion Is A Roadgoing Le Mans Racer That Never Was

The Audi R8, now right at the very end of its life, has served as a halo car for the German brand for almost 16 years. At one point, though, Audi was considering building something even faster and more exclusive to sit above it.

Now, years after the project was scrapped, a full-size styling model for the car has appeared unexpectedly in an Audi museum in Germany, giving us some insight into what could have been had things been a little different.

The car in question is known as the Audi Skorpion, and has popped up at the August Horch Museum in Zwickau, Germany, a museum part-owned by Audi and named after the engineer who established the brand in its original form in 1909.

According to the museum’s Instagram post, the Skorpion was in development between 2010 and 2013. It was intended to crown the Audi range with a hypercar featuring tech and styling borrowed from the brand’s Le Mans Prototypes, specifically the R18 that raced between 2011 and 2016.

Visually, it has the distinct look of a scaled-down Le Mans racer, albeit with much smoother edges and more nods to road usability. The aerodynamics, meanwhile, are said to be based on those Audi was using at the time on its DTM touring cars, so it would likely still have been a serious track machine.

The appearance of this styling model is the first official acknowledgement from Audi that this project ever existed, although Car and Driver got wind of its development in 2013. The US magazine speculated that 333 were planned to be built, and that it would use a version of the contemporary R18’s 3.7-litre turbodiesel V6 hybrid powertrain, giving it a direct link to the motorsport programme that inspired it.

It seems the project was canned not long afterwards, and the R8 would remain the brand’s halo model for the next decade. Now, of course, the notion of a diesel supercar is basically unthinkable, and all rumours point to an all-electric successor for the R8.

This isn’t the first time Audi has unexpectedly revealed a project that was previously shrouded in secrecy – in 2016, it officially debuted the RS 002, a planned mid-engined successor to the Quattro rally car built in the 1980s for the ultimately scrapped Group S ruleset. While that car was a working prototype, the Skorpion is just a styling exercise, but it does give us a glimpse of an alternate timeline in which Audi decided to play the hypercar game.