The standings make grim reading for Audi — ninth, two points, seven races into its first season as a full works team. Ask the people running it, though, and nothing about the master plan has changed. Over the Monaco Grand Prix weekend, CEO Gernot Dollner told selected media including PlanetF1 that the goal of fighting for the title by 2030 is exactly on schedule.
"We are absolutely on that path; to be, for two years, the challenger, then the competitor, and then the fight for the championship target year 2030; that plan is still in place, and we are following it," Dollner said. "This season is where we wanted to be, around where we are right now."
That meagre points tally hides genuine pace. Audi has been a regular in the upper midfield in qualifying and has matched Alpine and Racing Bulls on Sundays, only for races to fall apart. Nico Hulkenberg's Barcelona retirement came when a stone hit his engine shutdown switch mid-battle with Liam Lawson, leaving him to joke that the "racing gods don't want us to score more points."
The one area where Audi nods along with the doubters is its engine. Team principal Mattia Binotto, whose background is in power units, has not hidden that the bigger-turbo unit is the weak link: trickier to get off the line, and short on outright power. The team is set to receive ADUO concessions, a sign the engine is more than 4% adrift of the benchmark Red Bull Powertrains combustion figure.
Binotto won't promise a fast cure. "If we are measuring our gaps to the top competitors today, maybe the biggest gap is more from the power unit performance, power unit controls and drivability," he told the Beyond the Grid podcast, adding that "to improve our current one to be a better engine or as good as the competitors' engines, we believe that that cannot be possible by 2027, but to reach the right level by 2028."
The chassis is another story. "We believe that maybe we're even the fourth team in terms of chassis, which as an ex-Sauber, it's an outstanding result," Binotto said.
His bigger fixation is on culture rather than carbon fibre. Binotto described taking over a squad that "had been a great team, a fantastic private team in Formula 1, but it was more a matter of participating," and said the toughest job is "changing habits, mindsets, behaviours to the people that were used not to spend, not to invest." The yardstick for 2026, he argues, "is not the number of points. It's the mentality transformation."
Looming over all of it is the row about F1's next engine. FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem favours naturally aspirated V8s — "lighter, simpler and more cost-effective," in his words — from 2030 or 2031. Audi wants turbos kept. "A turbo [is] definitely more important than talking about the number of cylinders," Dollner told the BBC in Monaco. "We prefer turbo due to the efficiency aspect."
Dollner insisted there are no current deal-breakers over Audi's place on the grid. The sequence is set: establish the team, get the engine right by 2028, and lean on the chassis until then. Whether all of that delivers a championship inside four years is the question — and Audi keeps giving the same answer.
