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Johan de Nysschen Interview (Part I) Continued AW: We talked about why race… it’s fun, you want to win and it’s part of Audi’s heritage. How else do you measure success in terms of the investment that is made in motorsports besides the obvious one, which is whether you win or not? What are the specific metrics you look at? JdN: I want to touch on the point about whether motorsports is just about participating and whether that in itself somehow supports the brand and therefore the mere fact that you are there and on the track defines success. Or whether it is to win? I am coming down very clearly on the side that you are in motorsport to win; you are not there just to play the game. If we look at the racing programs of some of the other car makers who for various reason have committed...motorsport is an expensive game, there is no shortcut here. This is not where you play with small budgets. The level of technical excellence and perfection, not just excellence, that has to be attained to put you ahead of the pack is very, very high. And the law of diminishing returns applies. It really takes the ultimate in resource – resource in terms of people, expertise, competence and money – to be at the front of the game. And if you are not at the front of the game you have wasted everything. Does that mean you have to win every time? No of course it doesn’t. Motorsport would be a very boring environment if you only had one winner. It is that real sense of competition as each team tries to outwit and each manufacturer tries to outperform the other that brings the excitement and that brings the satisfaction of victory. So mere victory in itself - while that is the objective - does not define success. But you clearly have to establish yourself as a major player, as a leader, as someone who enters the race and on any given day has a clear chance for victory. At least that is how I would define it. You have to respect your competitors and you’ve got to know that every effort you put in – the other guys are doing it as well. So you can’t always win. And racing is racing. You have racing accidents, you have technical misfortune, and you have faults occurring. I mean these are highly complex and highly stressed cars. Things can go wrong and they do go wrong. So you can’t win every time... Success is also measured for us in terms of the investments that we make if we can see that motorsport and our achievements in motorsport have been recognized by the motoring press that speak to our target audience because they are the opinion leaders and we have to help make them aware of what we’re all about. It is measured by the exposure we get in terms of...you can measure the copy and the value that has in the marketplace. But is also measured by the extent we are able to shift customers attitudes and perceptions of the brand. And we track those. We measure them. And we can recognize the contribution that is made by having product excellence, by having great dealers, by having great advertising and by having the reputation for being a leader in motorsport. They all play a role. We think motorsport is an important element of our overall marketing mix and it helps to position Audi as a high performance brand. AW: Obviously you track the payback... JdN: You can’t invest this type of money and not track what you are getting back. AW: Given what you said about satisfaction of victory and recognizing success, do you think the bar is set impossibly high for the R10 given the success the R8 had? You are almost competing against your own legacy at this point. JdN: Look, the R8 was the most successful racecar in history. If you just imagine that the R8 that won Le Mans last year in terms of racing distance had one more than 100,000 km of race distance – it gives you an indication of the ability of the car. It won something like 80% of the races that it ran. That is a track record that is unrivaled in history. So to follow up on that legacy clearly is going to be very, very challenging. But that what Audi is all about. If you only move forward under conditions of absolute certainty, you will move forward very slowly. And true innovation is born from the willingness to accept risk and to push ahead regardless. That’s how you really make progress. Sometimes you’ll have setback and sometimes you’ll have breakthroughs. For us there was nothing more to prove with the R8. The car had done all you could have ever asked of it. And we asked ourselves how we would follow that up? How do you go to the next level beyond the R8? How do we do it in a way that nobody has ever done it before? That is what Audi is all about. Innovation. Going to places nobody has ever been. And with our diesel technology – it is part of the core competence of our company and we wanted to prove to the world what diesel can really mean for the future. Interestingly enough, many people say that motorsport is just an indulgence, an unnecessary consumption of the earth’s resources. What is the point of running around in circles and burning fuel? Actually the truth of the matter is that it is a test laboratory. We truly believe that if we are moving into a world that at some stage in the future is going to have to take a long, hard look at what it does with fossil fuels, what it does with the environment, what it does with air emissions. We subscribe to that sort of thought that says that diesel is part of the solution. For us too it is a very important part of what our company represents. Diesel technology will help conserve the earth’s resources. We will burn natural fossil fuels at a far lower rate. But beyond the time when oil reserve become deplenished, there’s the reality that diesel fuel is able to be reproduced by America’s farmers. If we go to bio-diesel we could really become independent of imported crude oil requirements. With the clean burning characteristics of our diesel engines we would also benefit the environment at the same time. So we really think that to prove the technology on the racetrack is just the spirit of where we ultimately believe we can bring the cars and these benefits to the road for the consumer. AW: Is the R10 then just nothing more than a showcase of TDI technology, or is it the best thing for Audi in motorsports? Somewhere in your message you seem to be saying that even if the R10 is never as successful as the R8 that there is the bigger picture – TDI technology is important... JdN: We obviously would like to believe that the R10 can be as successful as the R8. We have taken a far riskier approach now with new technologies – and there are some that I don’t care to share with now. There are new technologies that we are pioneering in this car...all part of the risk. We think that ultimately they can again cascade down to the commercial applications with great benefits to power, fuel consumption and emissions which we think will give us an advantage. Click here for Part II of this interview which covers Audi of America's current diesel strategy.
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