Audi legend fills a crucial gap in its F1 team

New Audi Formula 1 racing director Allan McNish is no stranger to Audi works projects that take time to find their feet and have technical hurdles to overcome.

The three-time Le Mans 24 Hours winner and World Endurance champion has been quietly involved in Audi’s F1 programme for several years but now moves into a formal, significant role as part of a rejig following team principal Jonathan Wheatley’s shock exit.

Under Audi F1 boss Mattia Binotto, McNish will have “oversight of sporting matters, engineering coordination, driver management, race strategy and garage operations, as well as on-track media and partner activities”. And within this, he could fill a crucial gap.

McNish is a proven Audi team leader, having won a title the hard way once already.

When he took charge of Audi's works Formula E programme, the team it absorbed, Abt, had just won the championship with Lucas di Grassi the previous season. Audi was arriving as a works outfit with enormous expectation, and with McNish, an Audi legend, heading it up, all the pieces should have been in place.

It was far from straightforward. Audi should have had a win at its debut event but was disqualified for an administrative error. Then, even though the package was extremely competitive and full of potential, niggling reliability problems kept recurring, and there was a lag between identifying those issues and actually resolving them.

McNish bore the brunt of it. He was the one who had to be the face of Audi’s issues, from the embarrassment of a lost win to repeat stoppages on-track that raised questions of Audi’s technical competence, explain the problems and why they were not being fixed as hoped.

But he was very good at it. He didn't hide from what was going on. He was transparent, easy to deal with, happy to speak on the record and off it. He gave reasons for why things had happened, why they were hopefully going to get better, and why they hadn't improved as expected when they thought they would.

There was one particularly low moment after yet another technical failure, having believed Audi had brought a fix that would work. Walking out of the Santiago paddock at the end of the day, worse for wear after another Di Grassi DNF but also due to a hurt back, McNish still took time to discuss what had gone wrong and where it left Audi on a macro level (in an immediate sense it was a woeful eighth out of the 10 teams in the championship…).

Even in that scenario, with the team at probably its lowest ebb - and McNish physically as well as mentally and emotionally limping! - he still wanted to make sure Audi's voice was heard and that the story was being told properly.

That approach gave a clear sense that the team understood what it was dealing with. There were steps that needed to be taken to realise the potential, but it at least imparted some confidence in the project. Audi knew what was going on. It just needed more time.

That is not hugely dissimilar to where Sauber and Audi have been for the last couple of years, and it gets to the heart of something that organisation really needs right now.

The potential is obvious. Some of the results over the past 12 months, like Nico Hulkenberg’s podium at Silverstone, and the way Audi has started 2026 with its works F1 entry and first ever F1 engine, make that clear. But the team has been needlessly vague and evasive on technical details, and it is not telling its story well.

There will clearly be time required to get everything together. And while Binotto is a capable leader and a good speaker when he does speak, willing to open up to a degree, Audi will benefit from a senior racing figure who understands both the Audi side and the value of communicating honestly. Wheatley went some way to doing that, but also followed the ‘say less’ line.

No team really benefits from a senior voice influenced too much by a culture that fears inadvertently speaking out of line and revealing too much. McNish has the motorsport pedigree and the Audi internal clout to state his opinion and share detail without that anxiety. He can put into perspective what the team is going through in a way that lands with credibility.

This will be a good thing for Audi. And it should work internally too. McNish doesn't have a lengthy F1 CV as a driver or as a team figure but he has enormous respect across the motorsport world, and he has been closely involved with and clued up on this programme from the start. He is not being parachuted in without context.

If Binotto sets things up to get the best out of McNish and allow his strengths to come to the fore, this could be an arrangement that works well for Audi, and for those of us who simply want to understand what is going on with them a little better.