Volkswagen brand racing project, with 50 years of time to hand in a full score

Recently, Volkswagen has officially announced on its official website that it will completely terminate the Volkswagen brand racing project and focus all its efforts on the transition to pure electric vehicles. The 169 employees and all the resources currently at Volkswagen Motorsport  will be merged into Wolfsburg’s Volkswagen AG in the coming months.

“The Volkswagen brand is emerging as a leading provider of sustainable electric transportation,” said Dr. Frank Welsch, member of the management board responsible for the development sector. To this end, we are concentrating our efforts and have decided to terminate the Volkswagen brand’s own racing activities. The deep technical expertise of the racing staff as well as the expertise gained from the ID.R program will remain with the company and will help us from ID. To build more effective models.”

Fifty years of brilliant achievement

In the official website of Volkswagen Motorsport, and the slogan is still in German: “Mehr als 50 Jahre und Kein Bisschen Leise.” Google translates as “More than 50 years, not quiet at all.” Indeed, the Volkswagen brand has had a very successful and varied history in motorsport, with a very diverse range of motorsport events.

There’s not just the Pikes Peak mountain climb that every motorsport fan wants to conquer, there’s the Dakar Rally that pushes the limits, and of course there’s the World Rally Championship. The most recent was the all-electric ID.R, which won the most important “Race Night” award of the Night on the eve of last year’s Essen motor show.

The Volkswagen brand has had an outstanding track record in motorsport for more than 50 years. It has been around since Formula V and Formula Three’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. I first started to pay attention to the mass brand’s racing activities in 2009. From 2009 to 2011, it was almost the time of its solo performance. The team won the Dakar Rally three times in a row. And, from 2013 to 2016, Volkswagen won four consecutive World Rally Championship titles with the Polo R WRC. At TCR, the Golf GTI won back the 2016 and 2017 international championships for the Volkswagen brand.

July 11, 1966 Formula V Europe EV Association Volkswagen Motor Sport was established

In 1990 Michael Schumacher won the German Formula 3 championship and the World Final in Macau with Volkswagen

In 2009 Volkswagen became the first winner of the Dakar Rally to use diesel technology

Volkswagen won the World Rally Championship for the third time in 2015

No matter how good ID.R is, it can’t escape the end

With the development of the all-electric ID.R, Volkswagen’s brand of motorsport made a successful transition to electric cars from 2018. Development of ID.R began in late 2017 and now holds five international records. Frenchman Romain Dumas set the first record in June 2018 at Pikes Peak International Hill Climbing in Colorado, USA. Later, he broke the record of the fastest electric car at Goodwood Festivaland the fastest lap time of an electric car at the Nurburgring North Ring.

Worth mentioning is that ID.R has also left footprints on Tianmen Mountain in China. In September 2019, Romain Dumas completed the 99 curves on Tianmen Mountain Road in 7 minutes and 38 seconds to reach the “Gate of Heaven” at the top of the mountain. “This is the most spectacular outing I’ve ever had,” said Dumas, who set the new record. “That will stand forever on Tianmen Mountain. It is my great honor to set the Volkswagen ID.R record in China. The small amount of information and testing we had ahead of time made it a huge challenge. The roads are incredibly narrow and twisty, but the ID.R. ‘s power makes driving incredibly fun.”

In fact, the demise of the Volkswagen motorsport brand was not without its roots. As early as November 2019, Volkswagen revealed that its focus was shifting to the production of electric vehicles, and that Volkswagen would terminate all racing programs that did not involve electric vehicles. Since then, the Volkswagen brand of motorsport has come to an end, including further development of ID.R, which is just for the sake of better ID. Family building and the devolution of racing skills.

Audi, also part of the Volkswagen Group, previously said it would withdraw from Formula E at the end of the 2021 season and shift its focus to the 2022 Dakar Rally. Audi officials have said: “Motorsport is an integral part of Audi’s strategy and we want to showcase ourselves at the top of international motorsport in the future and integrate the latest electrification technology into our production vehicles.”

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