Audi Shooting Brake Concept

The Shooting Brake concept evolved a century ago from European gentlemen wishing to have enough room for their guns when they were going hunting or to shooting contests yet at the same time drive their sports cars. A "shooting brake" is a modified two door coupe with an estate-wagon back crafted, rather than grafted on. We've written about some beautiful Shooting Brakes in the past such as the Protoscar Porsche 911. Audi unveiled a new highlight in the sporty compact segment at the Tokyo Motor Show: the Shooting Brake Concept is a study vehicle offering a further trailblazing interpretation of Audi's current formal idiom, blending the powerful dynamism of a sports car with a new sense of spaciousness and greater functionality. With its powerful 250 bhp, 3.2-litre six-cylinder engine and quattro permanent four-wheel drive, the Shooting Brake Concept produces a quality of road behaviour that in every respect lives up to its visual impact. The study vehicle sprints from 0 to 100 km/h in just 6.0 seconds, and its top speed is electronically governed at 250 km/h.

As is typical of every Audi study car, in addition to its design qualities the Shooting Brake Concept features a raft of technical innovations for Tokyo. These include the adaptive damping system Audi magnetic ride, an evolutionary version of navigation system plus with touch screen monitor and character recognition, and the new LED headlight technology.

Design

A venture into a new segment: the Audi Shooting Brake Concept represents an entirely new departure in design terms. The styling of this coupé, measuring 4.18 m long by 1.84 m wide but standing just 1.35 m tall, singles it out unequivocally as a paragon of the latest Audi design, yet countless innovative elements demonstrate how this repository of shapes has taken a decisive evolutionary leap forward.

Even when seen in the rearview mirror, the Shooting Brake Concept reveals at first glance a front end that is characterised by the striking single-frame radiator grille with dominant horizontal slats in chrome. As on the Audi Le Mans quattro super sports car study, the four-ring brand emblem is located above the single-frame grille, the surface of which is not interrupted by the licence plate surround, either.

The tapered shape at the front – further accentuated by prominent air inlets at the sides – and the dynamic cut of the clear-glass headlights give the face its decidedly forceful, dynamic character. A presence that echoes the characteristic front-end design of the current A4 racing models in the DTM and refines the visionary Audi RSQ study. A further element adopted from motor sport, beneath the grille, is the aluminium diffuser, which guides the airflow beneath the car with precision.

Viewed side-on, convex and concave surfaces create a subtle interplay of light and shadow. The dynamic lines lower down the car's body give the vehicle a particularly flat look. Typically for the current Audi design approach, the shoulder and dynamic line structure the volume of the vehicle body into a clearly defined, sporty architecture. The proportions of the large body panels and the flat window strip below the arching roof line are equally characteristic features of a sports car.

The clearly contoured wheel arches accentuate the powerful, road-centred proportions. The 19-inch double-spoke wheels originate from quattro GmbH and are a further developed version of the design created specifically for Audi's current top sports car, the RS 4.

One new element in the portfolio of design features is the upward swoop behind the rear side window. This, together with the wide C-post, accentuates the prominent rear end. This is where the visual emphasis of the Shooting Brake Concept is to be found: the flat trapezoid of the rear window and the pronounced arching, convex panel shape are the opposite extreme to the flat nose end and give the vehicle a crouched appearance, as if ready to leap.

...continued