Audi Sport, the motor sport department of German premium car manufacturer Audi, develops and tests highly competitive cars for long distance races thereby maintaining a closely reciprocal exchange with Audi’s serial development organization. Today Audi Sport finished an excellent racing season winning the DTM championship 2008. DTM is an immensely popular European racing series, with millions of fans visiting the circuits or following the event live on TV. The DTM championship was the fourth of four possible titles Audi Sport was pursuing this year. Official Audi Sport factory teams have already won the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the American and European Le Mans series of long distance races. Audi won the DTM championship for the second consecutive year. However, this year Audi started with a completely new car. This year’s Audi A4 DTM racing car is technically even more progressive than the predecessor. Audi’s engine developers reduced the inner friction of the power unit, improving the performance curve and torque characteristics of the 460bhp V8-engine. This optimization was done in Pro/ENGINEER, Audi’s established tool for engine development, which is also used for developing the TDI race engines for the R10 TDI LMP project.
Whereas the development of a production road car usually takes up to three years, the next generation Audi A4 DTM racing car was developed and built in less than one year using Windchill to manage CAD data from different CAD applications and to enable collaboration among engineers in body, chassis and engine development. Windchill gives all users access to the most current version of any CAD data, regardless of the specific CAD applications they are working with.
“Using the Windchill based PTC Product development system (PDS) reduces search times and unnecessary design iteration,” as Ulrich Baretzky, head of Audi Sport engine development, points out. “The management of heterogeneous CAD data is a big challenge. The deployment of Windchill helps us master this challenge.” Audi Sport selected Windchill because the software was already successfully installed in their engine development and, when evaluated for heterogeneous CAD data management, it showed to be perfectly capable for easily managing the complex Catia data structures. Additionally, Audi Sport recognized the value of integrating Windchill with their other enterprise applications, enabling them to leverage product information in downstream business processes. “We needed to develop a new DTM car which would be even better than last year’s winning car,” says Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich, head of Audi Sport. “The long-lasting partnership with PTC has supported us in again finding a competitive edge. Saving time in the engineering process enables us to evaluate additional design variants and pick the best choice for aerodynamics and chassis.”
“We congratulate the new DTM champion, Audi Sport factory driver Timo Scheider, the racing team and the whole Audi Sport organization on this victory which would have been impossible without the dedication of the many engineers who developed and optimized the new Audi A4 DTM. They have mastered the challenge to improve on their own previous innovations and have been justly rewarded,” says Marc Diouane, divisional vice president and chief product officer at PTC. “Audi continues to be a great example of the way leading automotive companies around the world are utilizing PTC solutions to manage complex product development processes. We are proud that Windchill and Pro/ENGINEER were able to support the engineering effort of this world class team.”
About AUDI Sport
Approximately 160 employees in Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm are primarily
responsible for developing and testing the race cars. Audi Sport is part
of AUDI AG’s Technical Development and is
therefore reporting to Michael Dick, board member for Technical
Development. Head of Audi Sport since November 1993 is Austrian-born Dr
Wolfgang Ullrich. With almost 30 factory supported race events in 2008,
Audi Sport undertook the largest and most ambitious motorsport programme
in its history. It turned out to be the most successful one by clinching
the DTM title with the new Audi A4 DTM, the Le Mans 24 Hours for a third
consecutive time with the Audi R10 TDI and also the titles in the
American Le Mans Series and the Le Mans Series.
