By: Michael Teo Van Runkle
Volkswagen’s Verkürzt Reihenmotor quietly departed this mortal coil on December 12 of last year. VW comms director Andreas Schleith confirmed the end of the line for the engine better known to friends and fans as the VR6, which survived a 33-year lifespan powering millions of commuter cars, enthusiast hot hatches, powerful SUVs, and even delivery vans.
That longevity no doubt owed in part to strong ancestry tracing back to Italy, where Lancia built the world’s first engine with a V arrangement. But it was Lancia’s original narrow-angle V6 that combined the smoothness of an inline-six with the power of a more typical 60-degree V6, all in a package more similar in size to a standard inline-four.
There’s no replacement for displacement, as the old adage goes, and a VR6 houses the same total cylinder volume into an engine with more compact exterior dimensions by staggering the cylinders in the block. Plus, a single cylinder head contains the entire valve-train and requires only two cams for a 24-valve engine.
All of the above means more power, less weight, and—most critically—less cost, hence why a company as obsessed with penny pinching as Volkswagen adopted the unique layout starting in the early 1990s. But Volkswagen still needed to solve a few challenges that the VR6 creates, and doing so would eventually transition what started as an economy of scale into a burgeoning enthusiast favorite.
Equal length intake runners, exhaust routing, and an unusual 1-5-3-6-2-4 firing order—the latter to maintain the optimal rotating assembly balance—all lend a unique character to the narrow-angle engine. The bleating warble of a 12-valve VR6 at full throat, in particular, inspired a devoted following in the tuning crowd. After all, why not swap a 12V VR6 into a first-gen GTI? It’ll fit! Bang shift and rev to the limiter, those tiny front tires will torque steer for days—creating exactly the kind of drama suggested by such an engine’s unhinged soundtrack.
A few years later, harebrained executive Ferdinand Piëch’s started to exert strong influence at VAG. And soon enough, in addition to the Golf, Corrado, Jetta, and Passat applications, the VR6 soon began to appear in sportier models including the GTI and a few Haldex-based all-wheel-drive applications, including the Audi TT and R32.
Here, the scene quite literally took off. With cold-air intake and exhaust bolt-ons, the VR6’s lore steadily grew, to the point of inspiring an annual event known as “Wookies in the Woods” that hosts enthusiastic R32 and Golf R owners at the Tail of the Dragon each year. Ripping over those famous 318 curves in the North Carolina woods, the nightmarish ululation reverberating from hundreds of VR6 engines sounds almost like a battle scene from Revenge of the Sith…
As much as the VW tuning crowd appreciated the engine, though, Piëch did more—and a number of his more infamous VR6-based creations will undoubtedly go down in automotive history. Notably, the W12 that powered the obscenely excessive Volkswagen Phaeton essentially married two VR6 engines together. And according to urban legend, the whole reason Volkswagen acquired Bugatti in 1998 was to bring a sketch to life: One day, Piëch had drawn three VR6s combined into a 6.3-liter naturally-aspirated W18 on an envelope, and wanted it to power the original Veyron prototype.
Here our celebration of life takes a sad turn, however, because it turns out that there is a replacement for displacement: forced induction. The Veyron would eventually enter production instead powered by an 8.0L W16—which can be thought of as two VR8s married together—with an unholy four turbos bolted on. Instead of cramming more cylinder volume (displacement) into a more efficient package as the VR6 had, using turbos crams more air into a smaller volume.
Boom—literally—more effective combustion, as almost every automaker turns to petite turbo-fours that simultaneously improve low-end torque, high-end power, fuel economy, and emissions. And yet, the VR6 persisted by growing larger, instead. The Cayenne that saved Porsche sported a 3.6-liter VR6, and the final VR6 sold in the United States powered its Volkswagen Atlas derivative. At that size, there’s simply no way to produce an inline-four that runs smoothly—even with balance shafts licensed from Mitsubishi, the Porsche’s 968’s 3.0-liter inline-four stretched the border of acceptable instability due to the inherently asymmetric rotating assembly.
The Atlas would eventually also transition to—drumroll please—a turbocharged inline-four in 2023, though VAG continued selling a few more VR6-powered Audi models in China through the end of 2024. The end of the road always arrives at some point, though, and after nearly 1.87 million engines built over more than three decades, the VR6 may be gone but certainly never forgotten.
