Taking a TCR Audi RS3 LMS to the Next Level

Greg Laube is not the type to do anything by half measures. After he was introduced to the track, he jumped in with two feet and began lapping regularly in an Audi R8. Soon after, he and a friend bought a pair of R8 Ultra LMS for track days, which he admitted was “total overkill for what we were doing at the time.”

The honeymoon phase was short-lived. The owner of the second Ultra, Jeff Gray, had the bad luck of watching his LMS burn, and not many can brush off a six-figure fire like that. Combined with the car’s vicious personality, this incident had Laube considering a more cost-effective alternative. “I can’t remember how I learned about it, but I got wind of the RS3 LMS TCR around that time.” This was the fall of 2021. He had to take a closer look.

“The transition to the Audi RS3 was less about the burned up car or the money, but more about the fact that the R8 Ultra was a bit too much for real race competition locally — and racing was our priority. The ST2 class seemed like a perfect class for us given the competition,” Laube said.

For several years leading up to that point, pro teams had been selling off their RS3 TCRs to club racers, who would regularly spend between $85,000 and $100,000 for a prime example. For a factory-built racer with turbo power and the track record to prove its performance, that wasn’t too bad a deal. Suddenly, these cars weren’t so uncommon in the NASA ranks. In 2019, Desert Flight Racing took the ST3 title at the NASA Championships at Mid-Ohio.  

When Audi pulled out of IMSA racing, many owners of the RS3 TCR were concerned they’d lose the support that made running these cars so straightforward. However, those who knew the cars intimately were confident that they could continue racing them. “They’re simple if you know the platform. Now, I can diagnose problems by smell,” said Anthony Gellis, one of Desert Flight Racing’s former mechanics.

There were perks for the potential buyer. Each car really needed just one tech per weekend, and parts were plentiful. “Most parts are easy to find — I’d say you can get about 75 percent of what you need from the dealership. The rest you’ll get through Audi Motorsport,” Gellis added.

All that Laube needed was some help and a well-maintained example of this impressive sedan. The car Laube ended up buying won the Daytona in the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge series in 2020 with Road Shagger Racing. Already proven, he brought on Gellis and Chris Stout, both having had experience with these cars at Desert Flight, and started Speed One Motorsports’ ST2 campaign.

After a few races at the end of the season, the TCR’s potential was easy to see, though they were down on power. Thankfully, the rules offered the Speed One team a little headroom, so, during the off-season, they sent the car off to Georgia where it was received by Ideal Race. With a tune and a larger Garrett 2260 turbocharger, the EA888 2.0-liter made an impressive 360 average horsepower and similar torque across a broad curve beginning at 2,500 rpm.

The refreshed powerplant made the TCR a contender among the B46s and other full-out ST2 builds, but the added heat was more than the factory cooling setup could handle. “Like clockwork, both our cars went into limp mode as we shifted from third to fourth in the middle of Chuckwalla’s Turn 4,” Stout said with a laugh.

To remedy this, they opted for a larger Mishimoto radiator, then picked up the TCR EVO package, which alters the shape of the front fenders and relocates the air intake from down by the brake ducts, where the airflow is much dirtier and the temperatures higher, to directly behind behind the Audi rings on the grille.

“These mitigated the heating problems to run comfortably at most tracks, though we can occasionally encounter challenges when temperatures exceed 100° F days,” Stout says.

Axle Strain

With roughly 360 average horsepower and something between 2,950 and 3,150 pounds depending on output, the car was one of the fastest cars over one lap immediately. Qualifying was easy, but finding race pace took a little more work. “The ugly truth is that the RWD cars just manage their tires better,” Stout said. “The RS3 is camber-dependent,” Gellis adds, “and easy to make into a rocket, but not so easy to maintain pace with over 40 minutes.”

A turbocharged front-drive car puts its front axle under immense stress. With turbo torque and a tire that’s being asked to claw the car forward and steer simultaneously, converting power into propulsion was a challenge, particularly out of slow-speed corners.

“When the front tires start to fall off, I’ll go slower to power and change the VAQ mechanical differential’s map — there are three. Opening up the differential puts less strain on the driven wheels and helps stretch a set over the course of the race.”

Of course, getting the rear tires up to temperature requires some imaginative usage of the handbrake — a large bar straight out of a rally car in this case. “I drag the handbrake on the warm-up lap. It still takes about two laps at race pace to get the rears up to full temperature, and it’s very oversteery those first couple laps,” Laube adds.

“Our aero package helped reduce that oversteer over the first few laps considerably. Prior to the aero, our first lap pace was compromised in many cases simply because the rear end wanted to come around and you couldn’t attack the corners a couple laps later. The first thing I thought when I first tested the TCR-X was, ‘Where did that oversteer go?’” Laube exclaimed.

Becoming X

With the bump in power, Laube was able to fight his way to the front of the ST2 pack and win the title in 2022. The team had been chatting about updating the rest of the car, namely the aero, but those plans were put aside until the NASA Championships when, high from adrenaline and sleep deprivation, they decided to pull the trigger and begin the second stage of the TCR’s development.

Paving a new path, because nobody had done anything like this with the popular TCR platform before, was for one particular reason: Make the car right at the peak of ST2 specifications to compete for wins and championships, not just podiums. “We knew we were leaving time on the table and we wanted to capture that time — since we now had the power dialed in, we needed the car to corner better, and that meant better aero,” Laube added.

If that aggressive yaw could be exchanged for another few ticks of midcorner speed, Laube might be able to dominate the ST2 field. At the rear, he picked up one of the biggest wings that would add the added downforce but not induce too much drag — a dual-element APR GT1000 wing spanning 65”.

The stock wing brackets no longer worked, so they designed and fabricated new swan neck brackets to still attach the stock chassis mounting points. The only issue with the aero were the forces it imparted on the stock trunk. “The mounting points — a couple tack welds to the skin of the trunk lid — were getting ripped out, so we reinforced the welds and added plates,” Stout described.

While waiting on an out-of-state aero guy to provide them with plans for an appropriate splitter, Laube decided to take action. “That guy was dragging his feet and we had the ’23 season starting in just a couple of months, so I drafted up a plan. I’d studied up on aero in my free time and drew something up based off of the R8 Ultra’s splitter. I guessed the area, and cut the first one out of plywood. This was about 50 percent larger than the original splitter — it stuck out five inches farther — and it balanced the front to rear downforce nicely. I took a guess and, thankfully, hit the nail on the head.”

The final piece of the puzzle, a set of louvers inspired by those on the R8 Ultra, were drafted up by Cody Webber, an ex-American Iron driver and a 3D printing whiz.

And so the TCR-X was born. The corner-entry oversteer that defined the TCR driving experience went out the window — no longer were they as eager to try to get the car to rotate as aggressively to drive off the corner in a near-completely straight line. The added grip from the aero, combined with the support of the Michelin slick, allowed for more entry speed, more mid-corner speed, and a more consistent radius through the corner. The pace is now some 3 seconds faster than what it had posted in factory trim, and it’s now on-par with a 992 GT3 Cup Car at places like Buttonwillow and Chuckwalla.

Attacking corner entries is something Laube has grown to love. “I know that I can overdrive the car a little at the entry and it’ll grip up by the mid-corner phase after scrubbing off a few miles per hour. The Michelins inspire a lot of confidence, and they’ll take anything I throw at them, practically.”

The aero gives the car more stamina, too. Stout mentions how they’re able to get more out of a set with the aerodynamic assistance. “On the old setup, cording a tire meant you had to change it immediately. Now, the car won’t last long on corded tires, but at least they can be managed for a few laps.”

“This was interesting during initial testing of the TCR-X: I would put down a pretty decent lap time and come in only to find the tires had corded. Before, you knew exactly when they had corded,” Laube added.

Trimming the wing has helped retain some of that edgy original character, but one that’s tempered by an innate stability the factory RS3 TCR never had. “The rear likes to move around a little, but that’s helped us. At Willow Springs, we were able to get the car down to the Turn 9 apex that much faster, and that, combined with drag reduction, gained us another 5 mph down the front straight.”

The car has been reliable and rock-solid, as one would expect of a turnkey factory racecar from Audi. Because nobody else has built as extensively upon the RS3 TCR base, the team’s trailblazing has brought with it some snags and head-scratchers, of course. That’s all part of paving a new path.

TCR-X still has a few more iterations left in it. The Speed One team has a 600-horsepower variant planned for running in endurance races starting in 2026. That bump in power will be accompanied by another aero update including a flat floor and a diffuser of their own design to replace the rudimentary OEM piece.

Their success has sold a few TCR-X packages, and now Speed One oversees seven total, including the three he owns. Speed One Motorsports has become the go-to resource for this unusual, underestimated car. We look forward to the next iterations.