How Audi achieved an F1 debut considered a "drunk" prediction by one driver

Among the many talking points over the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix weekend, a solid debut performance by Audi went somewhat under the radar.

The team has been on the way forever it seemed, since even before its official announcement in the summer of 2022. And given the challenge of creating not just a new power unit but also a gearbox, even the most optimistic people in the camp could not have predicted a Q3 and top 10 appearance in its first race.

And yet that’s exactly what happened, albeit tempered by a few frustrating issues over the weekend, one of which prevented one car from even starting the race – the nightmare scenario that the team wanted to avoid.

It could have looked even better. Gabriel Bortoleto did a great job to reach Q3, but he might even have been higher than 10th on the grid had he been able to take part in the final session. Alas he ended up stranded in the pit entry at the end of Q2, and that was the end of his day.

“It is still a little bit under investigation,” Audi technical director James Key told Crash.net after the race. “He had an issue and he couldn't start the car. I don't want to talk about the detail, but we've been looking at a lot of systems as to what happened, and why he couldn't start. Which is what he was doing, he was rolling in the middle of the pit entry, he was trying to restart the car. Turns out had we gone through the full power cycle, we could have started up again. But we didn’t know.

“In terms of performance, we could have perhaps gone a little bit further in Q3, maybe a P9 [ahead of Liam Lawson]. I think Lindblad always had a little bit of an edge of us over one lap.”

In the race, Bortoleto was gifted a place by the absence of Oscar Piastri after his sighting lap crash, but he was then handicapped by a bad start, and lost a couple of spots. He got them back, and after spending much of the race fighting other cars, he finished in ninth.

“Very happy, very positive,” said the Brazilian when asked about his race by Crash.net. “The team has done an incredible job all winter, working very hard to put a car in one piece that finished the first race, got the first Q3. It's the start of a long journey, but I’m extremely happy.

"If someone told me we were going to score points in our first ever race, and be in Q3, I would say are they were drunk, or what? It was a bit tough at the beginning for us, a lot of problems, a lot of things happening, but the team has managed to put an incredible piece of art [on track], and deliver a great result.”

Bortoleto was pleased to be in a position to challenge for the top 10 from the off, which wasn’t the case at the start of his first season with Sauber in 2025.

“It's great to be fighting for points,” he said. “We know how it was last year, even if the field was much tighter last year, sometimes you made some great racing or laps, and you were outside of the points by far. And now to be having a great race and be in the points, it's something great.

"Obviously, it's not enjoyable to be lapped by a team [Mercedes]. But that's the current situation we are in. And we're going to be fighting and working to reduce this gap, and one day be fighting with them.”

Car issues keep Nico Hulkenberg out of Audi debut

The downside for the team was that Nico Hulkenberg didn’t make the start. The German came to a halt at the last corner on the reconnaissance lap to the grid, and the mechanics ran down, retrieved the car, and pushed it to its position. That isn’t allowed under the rules, so the No.27 car was kicked off the grid for a pitlane start. It then had another issue that meant Hulkenberg couldn’t leave the garage.

“It became clear that during the reconnaissance laps that we lost telemetry on Nico's car, so we didn't know what was happening,” said team principal Jonathan Wheatley.

“By the time I got to the pit wall, you could see he was pretty much stopped just before the grid. And there's a couple of rules associated with that we're having a chat about. But we decided to get the car to the grid position and do what we could. But you're guessing – without telemetry, you're guessing.”

“It was telemetry related,” Key confirmed. “We've got no idea why it hit us just as it was time to go out of the garage. Then we had fluid leak issue on the grid. Again, we don't really know why, whether it's something procedural, whether it is bad luck, whether there was something on the laps to the grid. There's a couple of issues there. Unfortunately, we just didn't have time to fix it.”

If the painful non-start was a major downside, it was more than made up for by Bortoleto’s performance, which was boost for everyone in the camp. Testing had been decent, but the real potential was unclear on the outside. Audi had indicated that it would initially take a conservative approach, especially with the PU, just to get mileage done. Only the team knew where it stood.

“I think we spent the winter focusing on ourselves,” said Wheatley. “Not getting caught up in what other team's performance was like, not spending hours analysing everyone else's runs in Bahrain. We just wanted to come here and execute a clean race weekend. We had some encouraging testing, and we came here feeling reasonably confident in terms of the performance of the car.

“But if you'd have said to me, I could swap anything and give you P9 in the race, I would have taken your hand off earlier in the week! I think it's been a very encouraging first race for the team. A historic moment, an Audi F1 car scoring points in this first ever race. I feel the yin and yang that the other driver didn't get a chance to start the race. But all-in-all, I think we can hold our head up high and say it's a good start to our journey.”

There’s still a long way to go in all areas, and especially the PU. Mattia Binotto has made it clear that the internal combustion engine is lacking power. It’s much harder to progress when you’re the only team putting miles on an engine, when Mercedes has four teams and Ferrari three. Even fellow F1 newcomers Red Bull-Ford benefit from having two teams using its new PU.

“It's about learning, and we're learning at such a rate at the moment,” said Wheatley. “Every time you run the car, you learn, and that's always the case. But when regulations are as infant as they are at the moment, the more you learn, the more information you get.

“If you've got power units in lot of other cars, you're learning at an even higher rate all the time. So it would be fair to say that it probably does favour those teams at the early stages with this set of regulations.”

Audi believes it has big window to develop in

There’s plenty of potential to progress within a field that is far more spread out than last season.

“I think I was saying at the end of last year, it's going to be a different championship this year, for a lot of reasons, because of the field spread,” said Wheatley. “So a tiny little mistake on strategy, tiny little mistake on something a lap early, a lap late, last year would have been the difference between two or three places.

“This year depending on where you are in the pecking order you've got some safe pit windows. We were able to do a second stop today and go aggressively because we figured, why not? We had a nice gap to box into, and we could have a run at the at the other cars.

“So as these cars become, I'll say, more sophisticated – only because they're not at the end of their development – as we iterate towards similar pace, similar performance from the cars, that will come back to us again.”

He added: “The sophistication of the cars at race one is going to be very different in race one in 2030 or 2027, ’28, ’29. As the cars get more sophisticated, the engines become more efficient, the racing becomes closer. I think we're just at the early set of these regulations, and it's just a case of developing our cars all your way through it, including the power unit.”

Bortoleto is also developing as he starts he’s second season.

"He's a fast learner,” said Wheatley. “I've talked before about his work ethic, but I think I should make mention it now, because he spent the whole of January either on the simulator in Neuberg or in Hinwil, he based himself there. He could have stayed in Brazil for a little bit longer. He showed a tremendous work ethic.

“He's working super hard on with the engineers on the R26, and the AFR26. I'm sat here thinking that he's developing really, really well as a driver and into a future talent.”

Key meanwhile was keen to praise the work of his colleagues at the engine division in Neuberg.

“The guys have done an amazing job,” he said. “And Red Bull have done a really good job as well. We haven't come in and had a massive disaster, or whatever. I think we're up with them, and we actually did a race distance without too much drama with Gabi. We knew the race pace was good, but we were sort of traffic bound for most of this one.

“We were really conservative in testing, the PU, level of fuel we're running, tyres we were running. But we knew what we'd achieved in the background. We kind of thought, you know what? We could be well in the mix here. But none of us knew what to expect from our first race, given how new everything is. And I think we could be proud of that."