Audi’s first proper step onto the 2026 Formula 1 grid came with the kind of line that tends to get replayed in rival briefings for months.
At the team’s Berlin launch, new team principal Jonathan Wheatley didn’t dress it up as a gentle bedding-in year or a multi-season “learning exercise”. He framed it as an outright endgame: Audi wants to become “the most successful Formula 1 team in history”.
It’s a statement that lands with a thud because it’s so obviously miles away from where the project starts. But that’s also the point. Audi has been “coming” since the announcement in August 2022; now there’s a car, a livery, a room full of senior hires, and the unavoidable reality that in F1 you don’t get judged on intent for very long.
Wheatley, arriving from Red Bull with a reputation built on operational sharpness and relentless standards, pitched the ambition as a long, measured climb rather than a chest-thump about immediate trophies.
“We’re not here to mess around,” Wheatley said. “We have a journey. It’s an ambitious journey, and we’re humble. We know where we’re starting from, but we know where we want to go, and we want to get this team ready.
“We want Audi Formula 1 team to be the most successful Formula 1 team in history, but we have to start where we are, and there’s a journey. We have measurable milestones on that journey, and we’re excited to start it, and we’re starting it today.”
That’s the key part: “measurable milestones”. It’s the language of a team that knows it can’t afford to do the usual new-entry thing of publicly chasing points every weekend, only to spend the back half of the season explaining why the midfield is “closer than it looks”. Audi is trying to set its own internal scoreboard early — one that doesn’t collapse the moment a weekend goes wrong.
The uncomfortable comparison is built into Wheatley’s claim. Right now, the title of most successful team in F1 history sits with Ferrari, on 16 constructors’ championships — six clear of McLaren. To talk about surpassing that is to talk about a decade-plus of dominance, not a well-funded debut.
Mattia Binotto, also front and centre in Berlin, was rather more explicit about what Audi thinks is realistic in the short-to-medium term. He put a marker on 2030 as the point where the team expects to be fighting for a championship — and, importantly, he downplayed the idea that Audi’s first season should be framed through a final constructors’ position or a points tally.
“Aiming to fight for a championship in 2030,” Binotto said. “We have long discussed what should be the objective for ’26, can we make it tangible? Should we look at our ranking in the Constructors’ Championship?
“Should we look at how many points are scored at the end of the season? But I think as a very first year for us, that would be the wrong approach.”
Binotto’s reasoning was telling because it echoed a theme you hear from teams that have tried — and often failed — to brute-force F1’s learning curve. He talked less about targets and more about attitude, continuity and a kind of institutional seriousness: learning every day, becoming sharper week by week, and refusing to let “average” become acceptable.
“For us, some ways to become competitive, we need to stay humble. There is much to learn, and for us, it is more about the attitude. It’s being there, continuously learning,” he said. “That’s really what we need to do and becoming competitive means that average is not an option anymore.
“We know exactly where we need to go, what the journey is, and it’s simply, again, working hard getting there and somehow becoming more and more serious as well for our competitors.”
The interesting subtext in all of this is how Audi is choosing to present itself on day one. The bold, historic ambition is the banner. The operational reality is the quieter message: set standards, hit internal markers, and build a team that can repeat performance — not just spike it.
That duality is hard to pull off in modern F1, where every word gets converted into a meme or a stick to beat you with after a tough weekend. But it’s also how the strongest teams actually talk when the cameras aren’t around. The paddock doesn’t really care what you promise; it cares whether your processes look coherent and whether your people sound like they believe the same plan.
Audi, for its part, is clearly trying to show it’s not arriving to participate — it’s arriving with a long view and the kind of internal pressure that doesn’t wait for headlines to create urgency.
The rest of the grid will roll its eyes at the “most successful in history” line — and then, quietly, pay attention to the part about milestones. That’s where serious projects either start climbing, or start coming apart.
