A brand’s presence in the focus of young designers or submissions for independent design contests is often revealing, perhaps gauging more about the brand’s value as seen by future and/or up-and-coming designers than official studio projects can possibly reveal. Freed from production constraints and internal politics, they allow designers to consider ideas that aren’t as constrained. Audi Concept M, created by designer Siddhartha Dutt, is one such project—small in scale, but big in its expansion of paradigms set by Audi.
Born from a simple design competition prompt issued by the @agpcontest Instagram account—“Microcar + Endurance + The North Face”—Concept M began as a quick entry for Instagram competition entertainment and quickly evolved into something more personal. For Dutt, a young designer currently working at GAC Design LA with previous experience at GAC, Hyundai, and Honda, the brief opened a rabbit hole worth exploring. The question became not just how to design a micro endurance racer, but which brand could credibly support such an idea. Audi, with its deep motorsport lineage and evolving design language, emerged as the obvious choice.
From the outset, Sidd wanted the concept to feel radical yet believable, anchored in real brand design movement but without immediately and predictably harking the brand’s motorsport past. Instead, it imagines where Audi’s design language could go next, particularly as the brand experiments with new proportions, surfaces, and front-end identities.
Central to that thinking is the car’s defining “grille-to-DLO” architecture. Inspired by Audi’s Concept C, this most-recent and seemingly tablet-inspired singleframe idea is stretched and reinterpreted into a form that becomes the entire front face of the car, incorporating both grille and windshield into a single graphic gesture. Concept C–style lighting elements are integrated seamlessly, while the overall surface treatment reflects a more technical, layered aesthetic that aligns nicely with Audi’s current Radical Simplicity theme.
That technical influence is also where The North Face enters the picture. Here, the outdoor brand is both integral to the race car’s livery and also a secondary driver of the design itself. “Its seam-mapping and technical panel DNA translated into interesting surface break-ups across the car,” says Dutt.
Despite its compact footprint, Concept M maintains a strong connection to Audi’s latest motorsport direction. The side profile clearly reads as microcar, but the forms, proportions, and color strategy echo the Audi R26 F1 concept.
The details are also worth highlighting. A simple circular side panel incorporates a red half-circle motif, an elegant abstraction of the first-generation R8’s iconic side blade and a shape that also appears in Concept C’s body lines and also red segmentation of the R26. The side window access panel references the sliding Perspex windows of historic quattro rally cars, but with a clever twist: when partially open, overlapping forms visually hark the Audi rings, depending on their position. Even the wheels feel familiar, evolving the Avus-style design language seen on Concept C.
For Dutt, “This project was insanely fun to explore. Pushing proportions, experimenting with brand fusion, and imagining what a compact Audi endurance racer could feel like in the next era of motorsport.”
Scrolling through the @AGPContest feed makes it clear how open-ended the brief truly was. Designers interpreted it in wildly different ways, including another Audi-inspired entry—a three-wheeled, streamliner-style concept with ABT branding. Yet Concept M stands apart for how thoroughly it commits to its internal logic, moving beyond a simple challenge entry into a cohesive design statement.
What makes Audi Concept M compelling isn’t just its form, but its restraint. It doesn’t shout about Audi’s past victories or rely on familiar brand tropes. Instead, it embeds into Audi’s present, building upon it and suggesting a future where endurance racing, brand partnerships, and compact performance machines could coexist—scaled down, sharpened, and reimagined.
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