Race cars can have many fates. Sometimes they’re put on auction, restored and raced again by their new owners, left on display in a showroom, or stripped down for parts.

Being at the center of an intracontinental recycling scandal is a new one, though.

Remnants of the Audi RS Q e-tron that Mattias Ekström drove to a ninth-place finish at the 2022 Dakar Rally were found at a landfill in the Czech town of Jiříkov. Parts from airplanes, wind turbines, and electronic hardware like circuit boards were also found along with bags of batteries, the latter in violation of recycling laws due to the risk of leakage.

Czech newspaper Seznam Zprávy found the garbage came from ROTH International, a German recycling company that specializes in disassembling aircraft and turbines. The waste was claimed to be plastic and marked as such, though that was obviously not the case: the Audi’s body, for example, is made from fiber composite material which is difficult to recycle.

The landfill is situated at an old sawmill in the protected Nature Park Sovinecko. Mayor Barbora Šišková said truck drivers had brought over 210 tons of waste to the site, with one-and-a-half tons being just batteries alone.

Ekström’s Audi, however, is what caught the mayor’s attention. Fielded at the 2021 and 2022 Dakar Rallies before being replaced by the Audi RS Q e-tron E2, it is an electric car that is much larger and bulkier than its successor. In particular, Šišková found the hood sitting in the snow below a stack of plane and turbine parts.

“Development of this car must have cost millions of euros,” Šišková said. “Audi management paid the German company ROTH to dispose of the car properly, yet it ended up here. Including its license plate.”

The Czech Environmental Inspectorate and German prosecutors launched joint investigations into Piroplastik and ROTH, respectively. The former was found to have violated the Czech Republic’s Waste Act and faces a fine of 25 million koruna. Petr Hladík, the country’s Minister of the Environment, suspects organized crime may have been involved. Five trucks were eventually seized and ordered to go back to ROTH with 68 tons.

Audi subsequently confirmed it is a client of ROTH and is looking into the matter as well.

The German manufacturer fielded a rally raid program from 2021 to 2024. Despite winning the 2024 Dakar with Carlos Sainz in the RS Q e-tron E2, the team shut down immediately after due to a lack of parts. Ekström and Sainz have since joined Ford.

Featured image credit: DPPI / Red Bull Content Pool