For the last few years, the same rumor has swirled around the world of sports car racing: Audi will finally shutter its Le Mans dynasty at the season’s end. And every year, Audi has affirmed eventually that they’ll be racing in France the following summer. Unsurprisingly, the rumors abound again this year that Audi will put their 1,000-horsepower hybrid-diesel R18 TDI program on the shelf and there are some interesting coincidences that might corraborate that.

Audi has already announced they plan to enter Formula E as a powerplant builder and with many other manufacturers turning toward the all-electric racing series, this seems a plausible alternate direction. Additionally, superstar race engineer Leena Gade retired from Audi to work for corporate partner Bentley on its customer-racing program. You can also throw in that Audi’s other corporate partner, Porsche, appear to have eclipsed Audi with 2015 and 2016 wins at Le Mans.

However, it’s hard to imagine Audi packing up what is very likely the most dominant sports car racing dynasty in history after just two poor seasons. Since their Audi R8 debuted in 1999, Audi have won the 24 Hours of Le Mans an astonishing 13 times, including twice winning five in a row. They were the first manufacturer to win with a diesel (the R10 TDI in 2006) and with a hybrid (the R18 e-tron Quattro in 2012). While their current R18 has not enjoyed quite as much success the last two years compared with Porsche, their failures seem to have come largely from bad luck instead of poor equipment performance.

So what do you think? Lots of diesel smoke being blown or a legitimate winnowing of the LMP1-class field to just Porsche and Toyota?