2027 Audi Nuvolari Is A New Limited-Run Supercar With The Temerario's 10,000-RPM V8

Audi may have discontinued the R8 back in 2024, but it's getting back in the game with a new, upcoming supercar: the Nuvolari. Borrowing a V8 hybrid powertrain from the Lamborghini Temerario, the company says the Nuvolari will be the fastest and most powerful production Audi in history. More importantly perhaps, it looks pretty freakin' sick, and Audi says it debuts a whole new design language for the brand as a whole. 

Wide, low, unashamedly heavy-looking and, like, oppressively German, the Nuvolari looks enough like an evolution of the R8 without being too derivative or retro about it. But don't think of it as an R8 successor because while Audi sold that car in the thousands every year, the Nuvolari will be limited to just 499 units. And from a performance standpoint, it's frankly in a different league.

First off, that engine. It uses a V8 that makes 800 horsepower and 538 pound-feet of torque by itself and combines with three 110-kW axial flux electric motors (two up front, one sandwiched between the engine and the gearbox) feeding off of a 7.3-kWh battery. It all adds up to put down 987 total system hp, and like it does in the Lambo, that V8 revs to a sky-high 10,000 rpm. The electric front axle alone, by the way, produces 1,586 lb-ft of torque. The result is zero to 62 mph in 2.6 seconds, zero to 124 in 6.8, and a top speed of more than 217 mph. 

A brake-by-wire system clamps down on F1-derived ceramic discs with ten-piston calipers up front and four-pistons out back, although electric friction braking can slow it down a good amount solo, creating up to 0.3 g and recapturing up to 2.8 megawatts of energy, the same amount as an F1 car.

Par for the hybrid supercar course, there are five driving modes onboard: E-Hybrid mode allows for silent, electric-only driving, Balanced is your everyday hybrid mode, Dynamic and Dynamic+ are what you select when you start really going for it, and Track mode is, well, best used at the track. Specific traction control settings within Track mode let you tell the car whether it's wet, dry, or if you'd like traction control fully off so you can presumably pull off sick drifts.

Now that Audi competes in Formula 1, it's really hitting this car's connections to F1 engineering know-how hard. Not only is Nuvolari's hybrid tech and active aero said to be racecar derived, but new "Quattro predictive ride" uses sensors to constantly monitor steering angle, acceleration, yaw, and grip so the car can shuffle torque, brake strategically, and adjust aerodynamic parts accordingly to minimize slip. The two front motors, in particular, help a lot in the torque vectoring department.

A new space frame chassis is light and torsionally rigid, and Audi says the Nuvolari is its first production car with a body almost fully made of carbon fiber reinforced polymer. It's all said to be developed and manufactured using F1 expertise—a special autoclave manufacturing process that involves manual layering or "layup" allows for more complex carbon shapes. 

The car sits on forged centerlock wheels, a production Audi-first, and there's an S-duct in the front (air flows from the middle front grille and out from the vent in front of the windshield, increasing downforce and front-axle cooling). An active rear wing is said to produce more than 881 pounds of downforce. The company F1 team's drivers (Hülkenberg and Bortoleto) apparently gave feedback during aero development, and that silver Titanium color, too, matches that of Audi's current F1 car. Did we mention Audi competes in Formula 1 now?

What's more, the colors in the infotainment theme are an homage to the Auto Union Type C racer from the '30s, while the seat structures are made of carbon fiber. The whole interior, in fact, is a huge departure from current Audi cabins. 

Named after Italian racing legend Tazio Nuvolari, this isn't the first Audi to use this moniker. There was the Nuvolari quattro concept back in 2003, which looked a bit like a stretched TT and was one of the first cars to rock LED headlights.

Audi's new, limited-run supercar will start at the euro equivalent of almost $700,000. Deliveries are scheduled to start in the first half of 2027. Even if you aren't quite destined to park a Nuvolari in your driveway any time soon, we're looking forward to seeing the future A5s and Q7s that'll kind-of, sort-of look like it.

Audi

Audi

Audi

Audi