Audi team principal Jonathan Wheatley has put a number on one of the quieter structural problems facing his fledgling F1 programme - revealing that Mercedes' customer-engine empire is generating four times the on-track data that the Audi power unit project has access to in its first year of competition.
Speaking in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix paddock, Wheatley framed the deficit not as an excuse but as a reality the team must engineer around, while pointedly resisting the temptation to overpromise on near-term performance.
"You know, we're, as a PU manufacturer, we only have two cars with an Audi PU in them," Wheatley said. "And Mercedes have eight cars. They're learning at a much faster rate as well. So we're not under any illusions about that."
The maths he is pointing to is a direct consequence of how Formula 1's customer power unit market has consolidated under the new regulations. Mercedes supply Williams and McLaren on top of their works team, with Alpine effectively wedded to the Brackley engine ecosystem too. Every kilometre of running across that fleet feeds back to one PU truth-table. Audi, as a brand-new entrant with only its own two cars on the grid, is collecting at a quarter of that rate.
For an in-season development war defined by deployment maps, battery cycle behaviour and recovery harvesting, that data gap compounds week by week. It is also the kind of structural disadvantage that money cannot quickly fix - finding a customer team this late in the cycle is essentially impossible.
Wheatley was equally candid about where Audi sits on raw competitive form, refusing to dress up the team's early-season standing.
"It won't come as a surprise to anyone - it's a brand new chassis, brand new power unit. We've got some areas to make up. I think especially our focus at the moment is on the powertrain side," he said.
The combination of a new chassis, new PU and new operational structure is the kind of stack that has historically taken even well-funded F1 entrants two to three seasons to fully optimise. Audi's ambition - announced years ago, when the project was conceived as a Sauber acquisition with works engine - was always to use 2026 as a foundational year. Wheatley's comments suggest the internal expectation matches the external reality.
The team principal was warmer when the conversation turned to the driver line-up. Audi's bet on retaining Gabriel Bortoletto for a second season alongside Nico Hulkenberg has, in Wheatley's view, started to pay off in the kind of granular ways that don't always show up on a Sunday afternoon.
"Firstly, I've been encouraged with both drivers over the winter," Wheatley said. "Recharging, coming back fully focused, and absolutely embedded with their engineers, looking at every single detail."
The language is telling. "Embedded with their engineers" is a phrase that, inside an F1 team, means the drivers are doing the unsexy work of debrief detail, simulator correlation runs and feedback discipline. That is the work that turns a year-two driver into a year-three contender, and it is what Audi will need from Bortoletto to justify the long-term plan that Wheatley has been brought in to lead.
The picture Wheatley painted in Saudi was less a complaint than a quietly delivered project plan. Audi knows it has a power unit gap, knows it has a data deficit, knows it has a chassis that needs work, and knows the only response is patience, structure and the mileage to close those numbers down. The eight-versus-two scoreboard that he flagged on Sunday will not balance overnight - but in framing the problem, Wheatley made clear his team understands exactly which mountain it is climbing.
Source: newsformula.one