Jonathan Wheatley hails ‘historic’ first F1 points for Audi as midfield fight looms

After scoring points on debut, Audi boss Jonathan Wheatley has predicted the midfield order could change from race to race.

Audi scored points in its first race in Formula 1, with Gabriel Bortoleto scoring ninth place and breathing down the neck of Arvid Lindblad’s Racing Bulls car in P8.

Jonathan Wheatley praises Audi’s first Formula 1 points finish

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Australia marked the long-awaited arrival of the Audi team, following the German manufacturer’s takeover of the former Sauber outfit.

Alongside the debut of its new R26 car, it was also the first race for the brand-new power unit created by Audi.

Having maintained a low profile throughout pre-season testing, Audi proved consistently capable in the upper midfield as Bortoleto qualified 10th, ahead of Nico Hulkenberg in 11th.

Audi lost one of its cars before the race start, with Hulkenberg’s car losing telemetry on the reconnaissance laps before a technical issue meant he was unable to take the race start.

The exact nature of the issue hasn’t been disclosed, but Audi is confident that it has identified and rectified the problem that halted Hulkenberg’s weekend.

In the other car, Bortoleto put in a combative drive to take ninth place despite a difficult start, scoring the first points for himself and the team, leaving team boss Jonathan Wheatley beaming after the chequered flag.

“I think we spent the winter focusing on ourselves, not getting caught up in what the 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,” he told the media, including PlanetF1.com, on Sunday evening.

“We’d 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!

“So look, I think it’s been a very encouraging first race of a team, a historic moment. An Audi F1 car scoring points in its first-ever race.

“I feel the yin and yang that the other driver didn’t get a chance to start the race.

“But I think, all in all, we can hold our heads up high and say it’s a good start to our journey.”

With Bortoleto admitting to being overwhelmed by what he deemed a “crazy race”, he explained that he still feels confused by the regulations and even had made an overtake happen “by mistake” when he had plenty of energy while his rival had started clipping.

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Wheatley said he expects all the teams to quickly get to grips with all the challenges presented by the new regulations, and says the aim will be for Audi to keep pace with the development.

“We’ve just done the very first race with this set of cars. Very first race, the starts were interesting,” he said.

“Obviously, some cars are way more accomplished than others at getting off the line at the moment, but we all know that’s not going to last for long before the other teams catch up.

“I think I’ve just got the long-term view with everything, maybe because my view has been on the long term with this team. My view with this set of regulations is in the long term as well.

“If you look at all the teams, we’re at the very early stages of this set of technical regulations, the biggest change in technical regulations in my time in the sport, perhaps ever.

“The sophistication of the cars at race one is going to be very different from race one in 2030, 2026/’27/’28/’29, as the cars get more sophisticated, the engines become more efficient, and 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 the way through it, including the power unit.”

With Bortoleto having caught Lindblad’s Racing Bulls car, powered by a fellow debutant power unit in Red Bull Powertrains, the Brazilian wasn’t able to find a way past, and Wheatley joked, “ask him!” when asked why he hadn’t found a way around the Racing Bulls.

“The performance of the cars comes down to the efficiency of the engines in that respect,” he said.

“So, the more efficient the engine is, the better your harvesting and the better your deployment is.

“It tends to be that a more efficient engine probably has more energy to be used over the course of the lap, or uses it more cleverly.

“I don’t want to get into Mattia’s [Binotto] area, because this is very much a speciality. What I’d say is that the way that the Racing Bulls use their energy is very different from the way that we do at the moment.

“I guess, at some point, it’ll iterate down to everyone doing the same thing at the same time.

“But it was fascinating, Gabby trying different things. The way he tried his energy on the last lap might have worked, but it didn’t put him in a position to overtake him.”

With Audi having been at the upper end of the midfield in Australia, slotting in close behind the leading quartet of teams, Wheatley said it’s too early to hazard a guess on the pecking order as the midfield will likely be decided by the teams optimising from one weekend to the next.

“It’s a world championship,” he said.

“So every race track that we go to has a different set of challenges. The start performance today, in Monaco, would mean your entire race is over in one go,” he said.

“Just even starts, circuit-dependency, and how much of an issue that is if you’re not at that cutting edge of it. Every time we take these brand new cars to a new track with new characteristics, we could shake the order up, and the order is closer, I think, in the midfield, than any of us were expecting.

“But maybe we’ll be saying something different next week! It’s a world championship and the start of a set of technical regulations. Let’s get on the journey. It’s going to be fascinating.”

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