Jonathan Wheatley expands on juggling the Sauber and Audi work ahead of F1 2026 start, what can be expected in close competition scene.
It hasn’t been much long for Wheatley at Audi. He was a late joining when the F1 team ran as Sauber. He took up the case when the outfit was on an improving step. After a bad run in 2024, they started on the bad foot again in 2025, but things changed course from Barcelona onward.
They were ninth but managed to score 70 points and were solid operationally, even on the pit stop side where they struggled a lot in 2024. They improved in leaps and bounds throughout the 2025 season, which has helped them to be ready on time for the start of F1 2026.
Wheatley noted on getting the fire-up done before Christmas, something that was not imaginable before. He feels getting things on-track is the biggest win for Sauber, especially at a time when they become a manufacturer team, representing a big brand like Audi.
They have improved the facilities as well. Wheatley also clarified that he has utmost respect for the owners who ran the team and kept it afloat. “It would be fair to say that there’s been a significant lack of capital investment in the team over the last 15 years and this isn’t to detract from people who’ve sponsored this team, who’ve owned this team, who’ve kept it alive,” he said to media.
“So I want to be very clear about that. But yes, we’re starting from a long way behind. 300 odd people and now we’re nearing 700 people, people have been sat on each other’s laps. We’ve got such a huge ambition, so much to do between now and then. We’ve expanded into another facility further up the road from the original factory and we needed to.
“Some of us are moving back in. We’ve done a pretty significant redevelopment from the original building alongside the wind tunnel. It’s going to be nice to have an office, it doesn’t feel like it was built in the 1970s. But it’s a sign of our ambition and for me it’s been a challenging year, but an extraordinary one,” summed up Wheatley, who highlighted on the unknown aspect in 2026.
He is happy about progress made by Sauber/Audi in getting things ready, but on the result part and where they stand, remains unknown as per Wheatley. As being said by majority, no one will know where they are until they get to the early part of the F1 2026 season, as everyone will be trying to understand their package and how they can get an edge over the other.
“You’re not going to know, are you, until Melbourne, perhaps even not Melbourne,” continued Wheatley. “Probably need to be four races into the season before we can actually build a picture of our performance. This is an incredibly ambitious project. We have so much to do. I can’t begin to tell you. Running the Formula One team in 2025 has been one thing, getting ourselves ready to become the Audi Formula One team.
“You can imagine the expectation, the pressure on us internally on every single department, every sign in the factory, every single thing has to be different. Everything you see, feel, touch, hear in the circuit is different. We’re bringing together a brand new power unit with a chassis for the first time and we’re firing it up before Christmas. I can’t remember ever doing that.
“So there’s a huge amount to do and that’s why we talk about this project to be challenging at the end of the decade. It’s because it takes time. And I’m hoping certainly I have a little bit more time in my life when I’ve just got to concentrate on being Audi and not being on two teams at the same time. To be honest, the plan for that was to really ramp it up in 2026.
“It was about establishing it, getting a framework there and then ramping it up in 2026. So I still think it’s a very clever thing to do and obviously that was put in place long before I came here. I think the surprise is that it’s not normal in Formula One to do it. It is normal for everybody because basically we brought the whole winter testing program forward, so all of your targets are met.
“So I think for me it’s still to have a car ready at that time actually shows how well Sauber have done. So we’ll actually have our definitive race chassis, our engine all together and fired up with all the right people. I think also that to understand the characteristics of each car, how you get performance out of it over the course of a qualifying lap and over the course of a race distance, I have to look back at 2014 and think well okay what was the championship like then?
“I don’t think, though I would be very happy if it was, I don’t think we’ll have the top 22 cars separated by a second in Q1. I think it would be hugely ambitious for the sport to assume you would be there in the first year of these regulations. I can’t help but feel excited about it.
“The feedback that I’ve had from the drivers is it’s a car you can drive, you know these cars at the moment you turn in and you hope and you come out the other side and you work out whether it works out okay. So I think I’m just very excited about our own project and what we’re hoping to achieve,” summed up Wheatley.
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