Audi’s announcement that it will buy the Alfa Romeo-branded Sauber team in time for a full 2026 entry is one of the least surprising pieces of news in Formula 1 in recent months.

It’s matched in the stakes for badly kept secrets only by the long-expected confirmation in August that the German auto giant had started a power unit program.

Formula 1 has been attempting to lure Volkswagen into the fold for decades, and the dual news of Audi entering as a new engine builder and as a major and likely majority shareholder in a historic independent team is a major vindication for the sport’s new regulatory framework.

Thanks to the budget cap on both teams and engine builders and thanks to performance equalisation measures brought in to try to level the playing field, F1 is both profitable and also hopeful it’s on a trajectory towards more teams being in victory contention.

Audi has therefore been the convinced that the time is right to enter and that it will have a fighting chance against the established players.

Indeed it’s set itself an aggressive three-year time line for success — very ambitious considering Sauber’s modest position in the championship.

So why has it chosen the Swiss team, and what are Audi prospects in Formula 1 really like?

WHY SAUBER?

Sauber first entered Formula 1 as an independent constructor in 1993, and in the almost three decades since then it’s scored a single victory, 26 other podiums and one pole position.

Most of its modest success came in the four-year period it was partnered with BMW, when it achieved a historic second place in the constructors standings in 2007. It’s never finished higher than fourth in its independent era.

But the team has played a key role in F1 history, giving debuts to some of the sport’s best known drivers of the last 29 years, including world champions Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel as well as race winners Sergio Perez, Felipe Massa, Charles Leclerc, Robert Kubica and Heinz-Harald Frentzen. World champion Jacques Villeneuve also raced for the team in his later years.

The team came close to collapse in 2016, and founder Peter Sauber sold the squad to Longbow Finance. The new ownership signed a multiyear sponsorship deal with Alfa Romeo to rebrand the team, though the Italian company has no technical input or executive stake.

Alfa Romeo will end its sponsorship of the team at the end of next season in anticipation of Audi’s arrival.

So what makes such a workmanlike team an attractive proposition to the ambitious Audi operation?

 

The base of the reason lies in those four years Sauber partnered with Audi rival BMW.

BMW invested massively into Sauber as its de facto works operation, and the crown jewel of the Hinwil base was its state-of-the-art wind tunnel. The fact that it was second and third in the 2007 and 2008 standings despite reportedly employing fewer than 400 people speaks to the quality of the investment. Honda at that time had close to 700 personnel on its books and finished on the lower rungs of the table.

In fact Sauber’s facilities are so good that Audi regularly used the Sauber wind tunnel for its World Endurance Championship program, which delivered two titles and three Le Mans victories. Even now, some 15 years later, the wind tunnel remains one of the best in European motorsport.

Hinwil, roughly 30 kilometres from Zurich, is also around four hours by car from Audi’s engine site at Neuburg an der Donau. That’s a closer connection than Alpine has between its Enstone, UK, base and Viry-Châtillon, France, power unit facility.

It’s believed Audi will initially buy half the team, with more being acquired closer to 2026.

CAN THE TEAM WIN?

The team fully intends to win, and it wants to do it quickly.

“We would love to be competitive from the first moment, although we have to be realistic,” Audi Formula Racing CEO Adam Baker told Spain’s El Confidencial. “We want to be able to win races in three years.”

That is extremely ambitious given there’s no obvious precedent for it and particularly given it will deal with challenges on both the chassis and the engine side.

The nearest parallel comes in two parts: Renault’s purchase of the collapsing Lotus team and Honda’s entry into the sport as a power unit supplier to McLaren in 2015.

Renault arrived in 2016 with a five-year plan to become a championship contender. It claimed just one win and four other podiums in that time. It’s reset its plan when it rebranded to Alpine last year, declaring it would be a title contender again in 100 races, or a little less than five seasons.

Honda has fared better, albeit after a particularly woeful first few years as an engine supplier.

True, some of the blame must be worn by McLaren, which rushed the Japanese marque into the sport and also engine dimensions to fit its chassis rather than the other way around. The debacle came close to killing the project, but its partnership with established frontrunner Red Bull Racing has delivered two drivers championship and a teams crown.

Sauber, however, isn’t an established frontrunner — it’s a lagging sixth in the standings just one point ahead of Aston Martin — and Audi won’t have the benefit of the four years of development Honda had before it was first bolted into the back of a Red Bull Racing car.

There’s also of course the parallel with BMW, with achieved moderate success in its four seasons investing in Sauber. It infamously gave up a chance at the 2008 championship to focus on building a car for the new rules in 2009, but the design flopped, and the brand pulled out of F1 at the end of the year due to the global financial crisis.

And the last big manufacturer to enter as a works team, chassis and constructor, was Toyota in 2002, which reportedly blew an estimated $2 billion for 13 podiums, no wins and a highest finish of fourth in the standings before pulling the plug in 2009.

In other words, there aren’t heaps of happy stories about manufacturers turning up in Formula 1 in the modern era.

But Audi says it’s thought about all that and has a clear advantage over its hapless antecedents.

“We will enter at the beginning of a new [regulation] cycle and the other manufacturers entered in the middle of these cycles,” Baker said. “We have enough time to prepare.

“At the moment there are 42 months left for the first race. We are aware of the great challenge.”

The sport has also changed quite a bit since those other marques struggled for traction, with the cost cap and equalisation measures reining in the established teams,

And that’s also part of the reason Audi has locked down its plans in 2022 for a 2026 entry. Between now and its first season it can ensure Sauber is spending at the very maximum of the cost cap so that it can make the most of 2026, when the technical rules are expected to change again along with the introduction of a new engine.

WHAT’S STILL TO BE DECIDED?

There are two massive question marks still in need of resolution.

The first is: who will run the team?

Frederic Vasseur is the incumbent team principal and is well regarded in the paddock, having had a long successful history in single-seater racing. He’s also the boss who guided the team to a step forward in competitiveness this year under new rules.

It’s an open question as to whether Audi would prefer to install one of its own given its very well established and seriously successful motorsport program.

The second question is: who will drive for the team?

Regardless of the team’s immediate performance, these two works seats will be some of the most sought-after on the grid.

Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu are contracted to the end of 2024 and 2023 respectively.

Bottas is the incumbent leader and a safe pair of hands for the transition. He’d surely fancy his chances of sticking around long enough to see Audi’s investment pay off.

But neither he nor Zhou, who’s acquitted himself well in his first season, is really the sort box-office driver Audi will want to lead it into its debut.

 

Audi would surely love a German driver to lead the team — it’s already making a big deal about having the only German-built engine, in a not-so-subtle dig at Mercedes’s English headquarters — but Mick Schumacher is the only conceivable driver with enough experience, and he’s fighting just to stay in Formula 1 for 2023. Nico Hulkenberg, for the record, will be 39 at the start of the 2026 season.

Again, not box-office stuff.

But between now and 2026 every driver bar Max Verstappen will come out of contract. Of particular interest could be Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz at the end of 2024 if Ferrari hasn’t managed to win a title; Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly at the end of 2024 if the Alpine project has stalled; and Lando Norris at the end of 2025 if McLaren was still mired in the midfield.

It’s of course too early to predict, but given Audi’s level of investment and ambition, it will be a major disrupter in the driver market in the coming seasons and turn the whole thing on its head.

WHAT ABOUT PORSCHE?

Volkswagen sister brand Porsche stole much of the limelight this year given its advanced talks to buy a stake in Red Bull Racing to form what would’ve been a super team, but negotiations spectacularly collapsed shortly after Audi announced it was entering the sport, and there’s been little from the sports car manufacturer since then.

The appeal of the Red Bull project was that it would be buying into a chassis and engine program and therefore would need to make virtually no capital expenditure. It would essentially be a turnkey operation and badging exercise.

But this was also its downfall, with Red Bull deciding it wasn’t worth sacrificing its independence for no technical gain.

This is still Porsche’s problem today. It can’t buy a team running a customer engine, but there are no engine manufacturers to partner with in the way Red Bull was initially willing to consider.

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It also can’t become an engine supplier without a team given engine suppliers don’t win prize money, making it a major expense for limited return.

To enter F1, Porsche would need to modify its expectations. Buying and rebranding Audi motors may be one way forward given their shared parentage. It would then be a matter of buying a stake in a team and working out the rest later.

The FIA went out of its way last week to say that it notes “Porsche are still in discussions with Formula 1 teams”, though it’s not clear with which teams. Williams is the only other independent team on the grid, though there have been rumours Lawrence Stroll would consider selling Aston Martin for the right price.

A partnership with prospective team Andretti has also been raised as a possibility.