It’s a time-honored tradition to take your favorite car in Forza and upgrade it to the gills. Drivability be damned, we all want to know what it’s like to just do that. As it happens, one Finnish Audi R8 owner wanted to know too—though instead of buying an Xbox, he gathered his engineer friends to turn the supercar into a no-holds-barred time attack car that’s now one of the quickest former road cars on the planet.
If anything, comparing the Fat Cat R8 (as it’s known) to a Forza build sells this car short. It’s no slapdash amalgamation of off-the-shelf parts, but a build as unique as it outwardly appears. Take the body for example, which the team’s website claims is the widest known race car body in the world at almost 112 inches. That’s more than nine feet. Every panel is custom-made out of carbon fiber, built to adhere to a bespoke aero profile that generates a gargantuan 10,600 pounds of downforce at 180 mph.
To make use of all that downforce, this Audi employs purpose-built pushrod suspension complete with unique geometry and inboard dampers. Six of them, in fact—a combination of Öhlins and Tractive. The tire setup is square rather than staggered, with uniform 300-sections at all four corners, which is unusual for a mid-engined car.
As for that engine, it’s the 5.2-liter Lamborghini V10 (RIP), with a turbo strapped to each bank. This is no time-bomb influencer special, though; it has one-off heads, pistons, rods, and exhaust manifolds, plus a water-to-air intercooler to bring down intake temperatures. Linked to a six-speed manual from Holinger, it lays down 1,370 horsepower. That’s at the wheels, and all four of them at that.
Weighing about 2,866 pounds, the Fat Cat has a power-to-weight ratio of more than one horsepower per kilogram, or the namesake ratio of the Koenigsegg One:1. The hypercar performance isn’t just bench racing either, as the Fat Cat will eat the 62- to 124-mph dash in 3.8 seconds. That’s quicker than the Bugatti Chiron does it. It tops out at 186 mph, though you can’t often use speeds higher than that in time attack anyway.
Oddly enough, for all the custom work that’s been done to this R8, the single most expensive part of the car is said to be its Audi Sport GT racing seat. Now I want to know what Audi charges for one of those.
The Fat Cat prowls some of the most extreme motorsport events around the world, from Norway’s unhinged Gatebil to the World Time Attack Challenge. At last weekend’s Sydney Motorsports Park race, it won the Pro-Am Unlimited class, beating out the esteemed (and equally outrageous) C6 Chevy Corvette of Feras Qartoumy. It seems like one of the only cars out there that might be able to challenge the overall record at Pikes Peak—though any dreams of racing to the clouds will have to wait, according to a YouTube comment from the team. Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and see it face off against Robin Shute’s Red Bull X2010-inspired monstrosity.
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