Gabriel Bortoleto isn’t dressing it up as “teething problems” anymore. In the blunt way rookies sometimes can be — before they learn the politics of pretending everything is fine — the Brazilian has pointed to a single, glaring reason Audi’s first season as a works outfit has been an exercise in damage limitation rather than a statement of intent: the power unit.
Bortoleto, who has scored both of Audi’s points in 2026, believes the car underneath him is far better than the results suggest. But the engine deficit, he says, is so severe at certain tracks it can balloon to “more than a second” a lap — the sort of number that takes you from scrapping for Q2 to being anonymous by lap five.
“I think it’s clear that we have a chassis that is very strong,” Bortoleto said. “It’s not a championship-winning chassis yet… but we have a chassis that is very competitive today.”
The frustration is obvious: in a midfield this tight, you don’t need a miracle to jump a handful of positions; you need a couple of tenths in the right places. Audi, right now, is giving away far more than that before the driver has even reached the braking zone.
What makes Bortoleto’s assessment more pointed is that it lines up with what Audi’s own management has already hinted at. Mattia Binotto has previously referenced a deficit that can reach beyond a second depending on circuit characteristics, and Bortoleto made a point of saying that figure isn’t exaggerated — it’s simply where the project sits in year one of an in-house engine programme.
“It’s clear also from the ADUO that we have a deficit on the engine, and we are losing quite a lot per lap,” he said. “I think Mattia already mentioned in the past more than a second, depending on the track, and this is not exaggerating. This is the truth about where we are standing, and it’s normal, because it’s the first season of our engine.”
That mention of ADUO matters. Audi is among the manufacturers eligible for at least two Additional Development Upgrades Opportunities in the next homologation period, with its raw power statistics sitting at least 4% below the benchmark set by Red Bull Powertrains. In a regulation set where everyone is fighting for efficiency and deployment as much as peak output, that gap is enormous — and it’s why Audi can look neatly balanced through corners and still get swallowed on straights like it’s running a different formula.
The temptation, whenever a driver talks up the chassis and hammers the engine, is to dismiss it as the standard in-house narrative: protect the aero group, pressure the power unit department, keep the mood upbeat. But there’s a more interesting subtext here. Bortoleto is effectively arguing Audi isn’t far away in the places that take the longest to fix — the platform and its fundamentals — and that the biggest weakness sits in the one area the rules have already built a partial escape hatch for.
It’s also a useful reset of expectations. Audi hasn’t hidden behind unrealistic timelines; a five-year target has been presented internally as more credible than instant contention. Yet F1 has a habit of accelerating its own deadlines, and as soon as a team shows even a hint of promise, the paddock starts asking why it isn’t happening faster. Bortoleto pushed back on that instinct and, in doing so, sounded more like someone protecting a long game than a driver simply venting.
“I think we need time,” he said. “I think we have the structure, we have the money, we have everything we need… we just need time to develop, because racing is not like tennis or football, that you can change things quickly.
“They manufacture parts that takes a crazy amount of lead time to be ready to develop, to be tested, to put on track, and we need to be patient in that sense.”
That’s the key point: you can’t brute-force your way out of a power deficit in a month, even with factory resources. The hardware cycle is unforgiving, and any upgrade worth having needs design time, validation time, then the painful reality of integrating it into a car that’s already been packaged tightly. Audi’s problem isn’t just finding power — it’s finding power that survives, fits, and plays nicely with everything else.
Still, Bortoleto is clearly buying into what he’s being shown behind closed doors. He says he’s asked for a plan and can see it “very clearly” in the medium-to-long term — language that suggests a driver trying to anchor himself inside a project, not simply pass through it.
“I’m confident that we’re going to be fighting very soon,” he added.
In the meantime, Audi’s 2026 is likely to remain a season of near-misses, flattering stints, and that familiar feeling of doing a lot right only to lose the argument on the straights. But if Bortoleto is correct — if the chassis is genuinely already “very competitive” — then the moment the power unit begins to move in the right direction, Audi won’t need a revolution to change its Sundays. It’ll just need its lap time back.
