End of 1994, after the Le Mans experience with Bugatti, I had the possibility to move to Audi and work for Audi Sport, initially as technical team coordinator with Super Touring cars. Similar work as what I had done with Bugatti at Le Mans, but I wasn’t driving anymore on my own. Effectively I had a different job from year to year, first running through different Championships, from Germany to Italy and Belgium with the peak in 1996, when we won 7 Championships in 7 different countries. Unfortunately, this resulted in the quattro being banned from factory racing in Super Touring and I stepped up to become the race engineer of the first front wheel driven Audi A4, which in its first season in 1997 was raced alongside the quattros, which had been loaded with so much performance ballast, that they were basically out of contention. The year after I took over the project management of the Super Touring project in Audi, before getting to take on the technical coordination of the Audi R8C, which was developed in England, in parallel to the R8R – only that development started only 6 months before the race, which was obviously more than tight and led to disappointing results. For the 2000 season I became the race engineer on the #9 car at Le Mans, finishing second behind the sister car, which, contrarily to us, had a trouble-free race.
Obviously though, as a young engineer, I was dreaming of Formula1, the pinnacle of motorsport. With Toyota setting up their operation in Cologne the moment was there to take the opportunity and I moved on in the beginning of 2001.