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Audi's decision to make a serious attempt at Le Mans was made in 1997. The 1990s had been an enormously successful decade for Audi Sport with the A4 Super Touring Car taking victories across Europe including the high profile German STW, Belgian ProCar, Italian Superturismo and the British BTCC Championships. The success of the four-wheel drive A4 contributed in part to its demise. Race organisers were alarmed at the domination of the cars and introduced a series of measures that all but cancelled out the advantage of the four-wheel drive 'quattro' system. Audi began looking at other forms of racing to intensify the sporty image of the marque and settled upon an assault on the 1999 24 Hour classic. Success at Le Mans would generate an enormous amount of publicity. The design of Audi's first Le Mans contender began in August 1997 with an analysis of the prevailing technical regulations dictated by the ACO. As it was some 22 months before Audi would race, it was difficult to know whether the regulations would be altered but the decision was made to build a prototype sports racing car for the LM-P class. The alternative was a GT1 class car - the type of cars that were also running in the international FIA GT Series. GT1 was not strictly for prototypes and required development from a homologated road car. In actual fact, most of the GT1 front runners were nothing more than pure race-bred prototypes with road-going versions constructed merely to satisfy the regulations. Audi felt that building and homologating a road car in this way would be expensive and time- consuming. Design and construction of the car would take place in-house at Audi's Ingolstadt headquarters. The only question that remained was open top or closed - which concept would be more likely to win? Based on known parameters and informed guesswork, the engineers at Audi calculated that an open-topped roadster car would have a slight advantage over a coupe.
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With all of this in mind, the design work began. Initially, a short-tailed car seemed the best route and several wind tunnel mock-ups and a full-sized testbed were produced based on this concept. Audi stylists attempted to give the R8 a similar look to the popular Audi TT road car and early versions featured a curvy TT-style rear end. These efforts were thwarted when the ACO announced it would be permitting rear diffusers for LM-P cars. As the permitted length remained unchanged, the R8 testbed car suddenly sprouted a longer tail section and a suitably a clipped nose.
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