TG’s guide to concepts: the Volkswagen W12

What you’re looking at here is a Volkswagen supercar. And while that’s brave enough in itself (just think about how dismal the sales figures were for the otherwise brilliant Phaeton), it’s so much more than that. 

Photos: Italdesign

This is the car that finally debuted Volkswagen’s most ambitious engine project, ever – the W-shaped (twin-V) engines. Of course, they’d been hinted at with a mock-up in the Audi Avus concept of 1991, but this was the first time a working Volkswagen W engine had burst on to the scene.

Launched in 1997 with the all-wheel-drive, 414bhp ’W12 Syncro’, the W12 served as both a concept and a testbed for the W-shaped engine (much like Mercedes’ C111 was an engineering mule). In essence, the W12 announced Volkswagen’s intentions to bring a series of fantastical engines to life.

Funnily enough, the engine in the W12 was a W12, which was essentially two VR6 engines (a V6 with such a narrow V angle that it could use a single cylinder head) bolted together. Of course, it was much more complicated than that, but we’re not engineers, and it’s an easy way to conceptualise it.

Volkswagen’s dedication to the W engine arguably reached its zenith with the quad-turbocharged W16, as found in the back of the Bugatti Veyron, but the W12 wasn’t forgotten, with starring roles in the VW Phaeton and Touareg, as well as the Audi A8 and Bentley Continental.

But before all that, it was the basis of a mid-engined, Giugiaro-designed hypercar, which we think is actually very pretty, in a 1990s-meets-GT40-with-a-dash-of-Marcos kind of way.

Later on in life, the W12 became the 591bhp W12 Nardo, named after a record-breaking, 24-hour run at the eponymous Nardo Ring in Lecce, where the people’s supercar covered more than 4,800 miles at an average speed in excess of 200mph. Giugiaro’s Italdesign studio revised the W12’s styling for the Nardo version, which involved many vents and an extensive glass canopy.

So, what do you think is the most important part of this concept? The incredible mastery of the W-shaped engine or the fact that it came from Volkswagen, before they owned Bugatti, Bentley or Lamborghini?