Allan McNish has never been short of a confident call, but even he sounded mildly surprised by how quickly he’s ended up as one of the key faces of Audi’s fledgling Formula 1 operation.
A phone call from Mattia Binotto, a fast-moving reshuffle after Jonathan Wheatley’s exit, and suddenly McNish is back living the sharp end of a race weekend — not as a driver this time, but as Audi’s racing director, accountable for what happens trackside and reporting directly into Binotto.
“It was a no-brainer,” McNish said in Miami, reflecting on how the role came to him. Not because it’s an easy job — it isn’t — but because, in his words, he’s “lived it from day one”. McNish has been stitched into this project long before the badges changed on the factory gates, taking on various responsibilities as Audi built towards its 2026 arrival.
Wheatley’s departure, confirmed ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix, left Audi with a conspicuous operational hole at exactly the wrong moment: the first year of the new regulations and the first season of the Audi-branded works programme. Binotto, now carrying overall responsibility as team principal alongside his CEO position, had been clear there would be no like-for-like replacement. The solution has been to redistribute authority — and to place a proper motorsport lifer at the sharp end of the garage.
McNish’s CV is exactly the sort that plays well inside a company like Audi. He’s a former F1 driver, yes, but his real calling card is what came after: the long, decorated sports car career that made him a pillar of Audi’s endurance era, including two Le Mans 24 Hours wins and a World Endurance Championship title in his final season before retiring in 2013. Since then he’s remained inside the Audi Sport ecosystem, including a stint running Audi’s Formula E programme, and more recently leading its driver development work.
Now he’s juggling both.
“Mattia is the team principal. He’s the CEO. I’m the racing director,” McNish explained, laying out a structure that is deliberately clean in theory, even if it’s inevitably messy in practice early on. Binotto’s remit spans the power unit and the Hinwil-based chassis organisation, while McNish is the face and final word on the race team’s day-to-day execution at the circuit.
It’s a job defined by detail: how sporting and strategy link up, how race engineering feeds into decision-making, and how the whole operation behaves under pressure when something goes wrong — which, in Miami, it did. Nico Hülkenberg’s race ended in retirement with a technical issue, and Gabriel Bortoleto came home 12th, leaving Audi with plenty to chew on from the weekend beyond the headline result.
McNish, typically, didn’t try to dress it up as anything other than a learning curve — for him, and for the team.
“This was definitely a learning race for me,” he said, namechecking key personnel across sporting, strategy and engineering while describing the process of understanding “how they all fit together”.
It’s worth stressing what this appointment really is. Audi hasn’t simply found a friendly figurehead. McNish is there to make the trackside machine run — procedures, call-making, accountability. And if that sounds like an attempt to stabilise the operation after Wheatley, it probably is.
Binotto is, by instinct and background, a factory man. Even when he ran Ferrari, his comfort zone was always the technical and organisational side of building performance rather than living purely in the cut and thrust of the pitwall. That makes the pairing logical: Binotto drives the big picture across Hinwil and Neuburg; McNish ensures the race team doesn’t lose time to self-inflicted wounds while the broader project matures.
And maturity is the key word here. Audi’s set-up is unusual only in how exposed it is: a Swiss chassis operation with a German power unit programme, trying to behave like a single works team from day one of a new rules cycle. The paddock loves to talk about “integration” as if it’s a switch you flip. It isn’t. It’s a thousand decisions about communication, responsibilities, timelines, and how quickly the race team gets answers when it needs them.
McNish doesn’t see the split-site structure as a fundamental problem — more a reality that needs bedding in.
“It’s only going to get better, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s literally kind of started at the beginning of this year… we’re four months in in real terms.”
He acknowledged there are areas being worked on, but pushed back on the idea that Audi has a core communication issue between Hinwil and Neuburg. In other words: yes, there’s friction — there always is — but the architecture is stable enough to improve rather than be reinvented.
There was a lighter moment in the middle of the debrief, too — the sort you only get when a new boss is still finding his rhythm. McNish hadn’t clocked that Bortoleto had quietly wandered over and sat close behind to listen. When he eventually sensed him there, McNish spun around and joked to the room: “And also Gabriel Bortoleko, he is without doubt the best Brazilian driver in our team!”
It landed, partly because it was silly, and partly because it told you something useful: this isn’t a man walking into a pressure-cooker trying to act like a corporate appointee. McNish is comfortable in a garage, comfortable with drivers, and comfortable with the fact that race weekends are chaos even when they’re going well.
Audi’s early 2026 story is being written in these small moments as much as the lap time. The results will take time, the integration will take time, and the organisation is still settling after a senior departure. But the decision to put McNish trackside — not as a ceremonial presence, but as the person responsible for making the operation work — is Audi signalling it understands what its biggest immediate risk is.
You can’t develop your way out of a team that trips over itself on Sundays. McNish has been hired to make sure that doesn’t become Audi’s habit.
