Ingolstadt: Silver Arrows, Chrome Grilles and a Paternoster Full of Race Cars at the Audi Museum
At one point in the Audi museum mobile Audi's own museum at the Audi Forum Ingolstadt opened in 2000. Its permanent exhibition of more than 100 cars and motorcycles traces the four rings from 1899, and a paternoster carries the brand's motorsport icons through every level of the building. Audi Forum Ingolstadt in Ingolstadt, I stopped looking at a pre-war racing car and started looking past it: red-tiled roofs, white flags at the entrance, a cyclist rolling down the street below. The car didn’t mind. It has posed in the window of this glass building at the Audi Forum, in the Bavarian city Audi calls home, for years, and it knows it’s the better view.
It was one of the first properly warm days of spring, with a blue sky and trees that had only just turned green, so it was a fine day to spend indoors with cars. The visit starts at the top. A lift takes you up and you walk back down through the decades, which suits me, since history makes more sense when gravity is on your side.
The first car that really stopped me was a black Horch, so polished that I caught myself fixing my hair in its front fender before I noticed the couple behind me doing the same. Next to the Horch’s formal-suit look, the cream Audi roadster with its red seats seemed built for a single sunny afternoon and a picnic basket. The last time I stood this close to that much racing machinery was at Red Bull’s Hangar-7 in Salzburg, but the cars there were a good few decades younger.
Then came the Silver Arrows. They stand in a row on a brick floor beside tall windows, with huge black-and-white photos of mechanics hanging behind them, and they look like a starting grid that is still waiting for the flag. Number 125 has doubled rear wheels on each side. I imagine nobody wanted a flat tire in front of a crowd.
Lower down, the cars get younger and more familiar. A beige Audi with square headlights and an IN plate, Ingolstadt’s own registration letters, looked like it had come straight from a dentist’s parking lot in the late seventies. Behind it, a little green van from a dry cleaner in Biberach was still advertising its services to nobody.
The real star, though, is the paternoster. It’s a huge open lift that keeps turning, slowly carrying rally cars and Le Mans racers up through every floor and back down again. I stood at the railing waiting for one particular car to come round, like at a baggage claim, and then waited for the next one too. My tip: watch it from the ground floor first, then from an upper railing. From above you look down on the roofs of race cars, which is not a view you usually get.
I left with the paternoster still turning.