Audi kills 400hp four-pot

Budget cuts and a huge step up in power for Audi’s sonorous in-line five-cylinder engine have conspired to kill off what might have been one of the greatest four-cylinder engines of all time.

Quattro GmbH engineering boss Stephan Reil has confirmed the V8-killing 309kW 2.0-litre from the 2014 Audi TT Quattro Sport Concept car has been bumped from the business plan.

“The 400 horsepower EA 888 engine is dead,” Reil confirmed at the TT RS launch in Spain last week.

“It’s only 12kg lighter than the five-cylinder engine and we could get the five to 309kW if we needed to, so there’s nowhere for it to go.”

Even so, the new TT RS 2.5-litre engine shares some of its parts and ideas with the proposed heavy-hitter four-cylinder to reach 294kW of power and 480Nm of torque.

“The parts are different to the EA 888 from that car, but a lot of the geometry is similar,” Reil admitted.

The supercar smashing four-cylinder was proposed and engineered by the Volkswagen Group’s engine development guru, Friedrich Eichler, who in his last job developed AMG’s 2.0-litre turbo engine in the A 45 and CLA 45.

Then-Audi R&D board member, Dr Ulrich Hackenberg, confirmed its production possibilities last year.

“It can go into production nearly how it is in the TT Quattro Sport Concept,” Dr Ulrich Hackenberg insisted around the middle of last year.

“For production, we would have to change the cylinder-head, because the EA888 has the exhaust manifold in the cylinder-head now. With this engine and its output, it produces too much heat in the head to keep it like that, so we have to change it.

“But, apart from swapping in some stronger parts, it can still be made within our production system.”

It was even proposed to replace the compellingly charismatic five-cylinder turbo motor in the TT RS and the RS 3, but the Wolfsburg-engineered four reignited the development fire within Audi’s quattro division to boost the power of the multi award-winning 2.5.

That development is just one of the reasons the new, all-alloy engine is lighter than before and jumped up from the TT RS Plus’s 265kW to 294kW.

Another tick in the five-cylinder engine’s favour (besides Audi’s historic rallying links with the unusual engine layout) is that the new engine boasts 480Nm of torque compared to the TT Quattro Sport Concept’s 420Nm.

And then there’s the cost, which Reil insists would have been considerable.

“If we go for the four, to have that specific power output from a 2.0-litre, the engine is unbelievably expensive and then we still have only a four-cylinder engine,” he insisted.

Shame, really. While a TT with that engine would have been interesting, an R8 with 309kW of power from a relatively small, featherweight four-cylinder could have been one of the great, unsung accessible supercars.