"When you’ve driven once with full LED headlights you don’t want to have anything else," says eight-times Le Mans winner Tom Kristensen. "The light is stronger and vibrates less than a normal headlight - this is a clear advantage and particularly at Le Mans, a track that has many dark braking points in the night."

Audi's R18 TDI Le Mans competitor is the first car of its type to use full LED headlights, each one of which uses eight of the brightest LEDs yet invented. Main beam is provided by five LEDs per side, which are not brighter than the low beam but instead add extra illumination due to the position of their reflectors.

R18 TDI's LED headlamps provide better illumination and are reliable and maintenance-free.

But the LED lamps offer more than just stronger illumination: they are also maintenance free and extremely reliable. "The vulnerability to failures is extremely low," explains Dr. Martin Mühlmeier, Head of Technology at Audi Sport. "To date, we haven’t had a single LED failure."

Audi has deleted the electric cooling system used on road car LEDs and employed in last year's R15 TDI racer, giving the new lamps a weight advantage over conventional headlamps. The LEDs in the R18 TDI are cooled by airflow, automatically dimming if the air flow stops. "Our colleagues in production car development are very interested to see how we implement this," says Christopher Reinke, Technical Project Leader for the Audi R18 TDI. "However, we have the advantage in motorsport that the car spends less time at a standstill. On the highway, the lights mustn’t go out even if the car is in a traffic jam."