After the trackday at the Ring I knew fitting the rear wing was high on the list. I’m a confidence driver on track; if I feel the car underneath me is doing what I want and feels stable, I can push more. It was the same with the Golf, I drove it hard because I knew what it was going to do and how it would respond. When things behave unexpectedly and I have to react, I don’t enjoy that so much.
I always knew what wing I wanted to fit on the R8 after seeing the GT3 cars years ago. Finding one was difficult, but I managed to find a genuine one for sale. It’s a genuine AudiSport LMS part (42A827917),
It comes in an special Audi bag. Of course it does.. 
Now that’s a wing. 1760mm wide with a 340mm chord!
I also picked up the OEM wing supports, but the problem is all the GT3 cars have lift-out perspex rear screens to access the engine bay. I want to keep the car looking ‘stock’ apart from the wing, so I needed to do something different.
As much as I like the look of the wing, and when on track it’s great, I am not driving around Europe on a road trip with it fitted. It’s simply not me. That meant it needed to be removable, and fairly easily too.
The AudiSport arms are thick aluminium and bolt to the rear chassis, between the chassis legs and H brace in the engine bay.
After removing the airbox and the top bolt from the H frame, you can see where the mount goes. The metal shims (under the 3 /// in the pic) are removed, and the mount fits in there instead.
Accessing the lower bolt is a bigger job and not something I can do easily, so I decided to use only the top bolt and the chassis leg.
I started off by chopping off the lower mounting part of the arm, using one of the 2 x M6 upper locating bolts to position it.
I then cut a slot in the lower part I’d chopped off and bolted that to the chassis leg using the OEM mounting point.
A piece of aluminium is used to bridge the gap between the pieces.
Everything cleaned up, held in place with a screwdriver to set position.
I then welded as much as I could access in situ and let it cool.
Removed and fully welded the three parts together.
Refitted into place and bolted it up.
As I’d removed some of the leverage, I utilised the rear mounting point and welded in a short arm at the back of the support to help address the downwards force the wing will introduce.
The rear bracket holds the tailgate latch and rear OEM spoiler. With the wing supports, that’s now too wide to fit into the space, so I chopped the ends off and made a new end plate.
Again, welded what I could in place, then removed to do the underside.
Cleaned everything up, painted, and I think it looks pretty good. 
When the rear arms are removed, I fit an 8mm spacer in place of the arms as obviously the rear frame is now too narrow without it.
With the rear deck lid removed, the tailgate closes as the screen frame sits inside the arms.
I picked up a rear deck lid, it’s plastic and quite light.
Obviously, this catches on the arms if trying to close.
I need to cut a U out of the deck.
The arms aren’t perfectly parallel to the deck, so the slots need to be a little bit wider than I’d like. Once it’s fitted, you don’t actually notice.
The rear of the arms catches on the OEM spoiler, so that hump was ground off.
I fitted a wing!
Oh, I almost forgot. The wing stops the tailgate being opened, the deck catches on it. What I did was fit a bolt and rivnut to the rear, allowing the wing to easily pivot. The rear (rusty 
) bolt is nipped up tight.
It holds the wing in the tilted position without the wing touching the rear bodywork.
The front hole is held in place by an 8mm pin and R clip.
The circlip allows me to quickly pull out the R clip, push out the pin, and open the tailgate in seconds. It also makes angle adjustment much easier.
Audi endplates are small and I only had one.
Made a couple of replacements from ABS plastic. Simple rectangular doesn’t look ‘right’.
Cut a rear angle and wrapped in carbon vinyl.
Narrower than the rear arches, which is obviously important for the times I do drive on the road.
Side on, it looks a bit too big.
But in person and from the front and rear, I think it looks great.
So does it work? Well, the answer is obviously yes, it does. The rear feels extremely planted at high speed. So much so that the front goes light. The eagle-eyed will spot I fitted a splitter to help address that, I’ll post that installation next.
What I have found is that the rooster tail in the rain is huge. People mention that after I pass them, they can’t stay behind me due to the huge amount of spray that lingers in the air. People race these nose to tail, that’s why I’ll never be a racing driver!
To remove the wing and refit the smaller ‘road’ wing takes under an hour from start to finish.