Jonathan Wheatley sat down with Mirror Sport at Imola to discuss his first six weeks in charge, how the transformation to Audi is going and gave the inside track on Gabriel Bortoleto and Nico Hulkenberg
This weekend’s Imola race marks 600 appearances in Formula 1 for Sauber. And, yet, the team finds itself once again at the very beginning of its story. A rebirth will take place next year, as the Switzerland-based outfit slowly turns into the Audi works team.
It marks the first time the world-famous German carmaker has entered in F1. And preparations have been ongoing for years now, since long before the public announcement at the 2022 Belgian Grand Prix that Audi had decided to grab a slice of the pie.
Plenty of things have already changed. Hinwil, near Zurich, will continue to be home to the outfit, but engines are being designed and built in Neuburg, Germany, while a satellite base is planned for the UK later this year to leave, of all the teams on the grid, only Ferrari without a presence in ‘Motorsport Valley’.
And then there’s the top personnel. Jonathan Wheatley joined as team principal in April this year, after almost two decades as a key player in the success of Red Bull Racing, while a recent restructure saw former Ferrari chief Mattia Binotto named head of Audi’s F1 project.
“Very clearly, we’re going to look like a very different team from the moment the garage doors open next year,” Wheatley told Mirror Sport at Imola. If that includes from a performance perspective, then that will be very welcome.
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Last year was a chastening experience for the most part and saw Sauber score just four points, when Zhou Guanyu finished eighth in Qatar – the penultimate race of the 2024 season. They have already bettered that tally with the six points scored by Nico Hulkenberg on the opening day in Melbourne.
But still Sauber sit bottom of the constructors’ championship with 18 rounds still to go in what looks set to be another transition year before the Audi era officially begins. Despite that, Wheatley seems convinced that he won’t have to work too hard to keep staff motivated.
He said: “I ask myself, how do I keep motivated, how do I keep pushing forwards? If you look at this Audi F1 project, I mean, honestly, is there a better news story in sport full-stop at the moment? Is there a more exciting project to be a part of? Everyone should be excited, it’s a great brand, this is a great team with a great history that we’re celebrating this weekend.
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“It’s an exciting time, honestly, so you just have to look at the future, you have to relentlessly look at continuous improvement, you have to relentlessly look to the positives and feel those incremental changes as they come along and just continuously improve. And then I think the focus is so far forwards, what’s happening at the moment is just, you know, happening.”
One key decision already made is who the first Audi drivers in F1 will be. Nico Hulkenberg was signed early in 2024, having enjoyed a very successful return to the sport with Haas, and it was later confirmed that he would be joined by rookie Formula 2 champion Gabriel Bortoleto, after they missed out on top target Carlos Sainz.
“I’m completely comfortable with our driver selection,” said Wheatley, who joined after both had already been signed. “They work brilliantly together, they look each other in the eye, they have a great relationship with each other. Gabi is like an open book, he’s trying whatever he can to learn.”
Hulkenberg is not a bad driver to learn from at all. Sunday’s Imola race will be his 234th start in F1 making him the third most experienced driver on the grid behind only Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton. Assuming he sees out his Audi contract, which runs for now until the end of 2026, he will break into the top 10 of drivers with the most race starts in history.
“I’ve known Nico for a long time… I’ve always liked him from the very beginning, actually, as a character, as a person, the way he’s presented himself,” said Wheatley. “That time he turned up in Covid and just jumped in a Formula 1 car. When he jumped in at Le Mans and won. He’s an extraordinary talent – we don’t need to talk about that.
“But what he’s doing here is being a mentor for Gabi in many ways. On one side you’ve got this tremendous experience, also this incredibly level-headed approach. And Gabi’s learning from that.
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“I really think we’ve got an incredibly strong driver pairing in that respect. We’ve got all of the experience and proven speed of Nico, plus we’ve got this raw talent in Gabriel, who’s learning from the right side and with a tremendous work ethic. The team is benefiting as a result.”
Bortoleto has yet to score a point since stepping up to F1, but the general consensus is that he is a promising young driver who has not yet been given a car in which he can show what he can do. “Hopefully we’ll have a car soon where we can do him justice,” Wheatley said, adding that the Brazilian driver is “not at all” being judged on the number of points he scores this year.
“I think our car’s capable of Q2 and I think hopefully we can prove that. I think with Gabriel, you’re just going to see more and more and more come out of him in terms of performance.
“But more than that, the way he can read a race, he has that capacity in the car to be able to read the race, look at the situations, look at the timing, look at the video screens. And that’s a great sign, isn’t it? All the great drivers are capable of doing that. It’s either natural or not.”
It’s not necessary to ask what the long-term aim for the Audi project is – the answer would be the same for every team up and down the grid. They are all licking their lips at the prospect of using the 2026 rule changes to fast-track their progress to the front of the grid, though the reality remains that someone still has to finish last.
Everyone at Sauber is a bit fed up of doing that, and Audi have an excellent record when it comes to success in every form of motorsport they have ever entered. “Our goal is ambitious but clear. We’re not here to mess around – we’re here to win races and win world championships,” said Wheatley.
“We need to put ourselves on that path. We need to, as Audi have it every time they’ve entered any form of motorsport, do it slightly differently to everyone else, and we’re looking at ways of doing it differently because we know we’ve got a very ambitious target, you know, and we need to deliver on it.
“So we’re trying to straighten the corners and find the shortest route there. But as I’ve said at the beginning, we’re not underestimating the task and there’s no arrogance or ego here. We know what we’re up against and we’re going to be pragmatic and we’re going to make the steps we need to make to get there.”
“I am genuinely tremendously excited about what we can achieve. I’ve seen so many things that we can do differently already and it’s a case of just getting on that journey and getting the team on the journey there. The difficult thing would be if the team wasn’t ready to change or wasn’t looking to change, but there is, there’s a capacity to and there’s an energy to.”
