Championship position: 8th (12 points)
After several years of preparation—having initially announced is entry in 2022—Audi finally arrived in Formula 1 in 2026, taking over and rebranding the Sauber outfit, and has had a solid if unspectacular campaign. Given it has always targeted 2030 as the first year of competing for world championships that suits Audi just fine.
If the car was still a Sauber, and still had Sauber branding, there would be little discernible difference, which is in many ways a credit to Audi, given it is the company’s first crack at a Formula 1 power unit. It could have gone horribly wrong (and here is a chance to have a sideways glance at Honda), but it has been competent, giving it a solid platform on which to build.
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A stone kicked up by Liam Lawson at the Barcelona GP hit the safety switch on Nico Hulkenberg’s car, shutting it down.
A slightly larger turbo has been a hindrance at race starts, with Nico Hulkenberg and sophomore Gabriel Bortoleto often left with too much to do after the first lap, while a spate of reliability issues during the first segment of the year in particular proved costly. But they were teething troubles the outfit expected, and each setback led to fixes and further progress, though there were others that were just highly unlucky—such as a stone hitting the safety switch on Hulkenberg’s R26 in Spain and causing an instant shutdown.
The exit of Jonathan Wheatley as Team Principal was a surprise but given the mooted tension with Head of F1 Project Mattia Binotto it avoided lingering issues, with the experienced Allan McNish ably stepping into the role of Racing Director, having previously been helping behind-the-scenes.
“For us, we are fighting in that midfield area and it’s to try to consistently be there, chipping at it,” McNish said. “It depends, I think, a little bit circuit to circuit whether we’re ahead of one or behind, but ultimately, we need to be making sure that we’re delivering whatever the package can deliver each weekend. That’s the goal. Where it is relative, in terms of fighting in the top 10 or just outside it, that depends on the competition as well as us.”
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Head of F1 Project Mattia Binotto (right) tapped Allan McNish to replace Racing Director Jonathan Wheatley when the latter left fairly abruptly after just two races.
Audi believes it has a chassis that would allow it to mix with the front-runners on occasion—given the ongoing limitations of the power unit—which is a promising outlook for the future.
Audi should have more than its 12-point tally but that owes much to the poor reliability early on, and the misfortune or frustration—depending on your stance—of often falling on the wrong side of the top 10 cut-off. Audi has finished the majority of its races in 11th or 12th—just outside of the points-paying positions—and has tended to qualify there, too. Bortoleto’s back-to-back eighth places in Britain and Belgium were followed by Hulkenberg finally collecting his first points of the year in Hungary courtesy of ninth. Those improved performances, in conjunction with better reliability, have enabled Audi to climb in front of Williams in the championship, while recently in terms of pace it has been quicker than both Alpine and Haas.
U.K.-based Phillip Horton started covering Grands Prix while still at university and swiftly deemed that writing about Formula 1 and the behind-the-scenes machinations was much more engaging than reading centuries-old novels. Degree gained, he went on to cover the sport full-time from 2014 and is as intrigued and excited by the destinations Formula 1 visits during its lengthy annual world tour as the racing itself. Phillip joined Autoweek in 2021 and while he has just about learned to spell in American English he has yet to find anywhere in America that makes a proper cup of tea.