Audi’s Hinwil rebuild just added another Red Bull-schooled pillar. Lee Stevenson, Max Verstappen’s former chief mechanic, has been promoted to team manager as the Sauber-run outfit accelerates its transformation into the Audi F1 team for 2026.
The timing is no coincidence. Audi quietly ticked off a key milestone last week with a Barcelona shakedown of its 2026-spec car — the first team to put rubber to tarmac under the new rules cycle. And with garages soon to be re-wired for an all-new power unit formula and trimmed-down aero, race operations become a battleground. That’s where Stevenson comes in.
If the name rings a bell, it should. Stevenson spent nearly two decades at Red Bull, climbing from mechanic to chief mechanic, and was in the thick of it during Verstappen’s run of three straight titles. In 2023, when Red Bull won 21 of 22 grands prix, he was the man on the shop floor setting the rhythm. He moved to Hinwil in April 2024 as chief mechanic. Now, less than a year later, he steps into the team manager role — a job that will put him at the nerve center of Audi’s race-weekend choreography: garage flow, pit stop execution, parc fermé protocol, penalty wrangling, the thousand tiny calls that decide whether a good Sunday becomes a great one.
There’s a clear Red Bull throughline at Audi now. Jonathan Wheatley, the long-time sporting director who turned Milton Keynes’ pit crew into the gold standard, took over as team principal in 2024. His imprint is unmistakable. Red Bull owns four of the five quickest stops in F1 history; the outright record still belongs to McLaren’s 1.80s service for Lando Norris at the 2023 Qatar GP. Wheatley’s not shy about chasing those micro-gains, and Stevenson’s promotion reads like part of the same playbook.
The Verstappen connection doesn’t end there. Matt Caller — Verstappen’s number-one mechanic in the Red Bull garage — has also made the switch to Hinwil and is set to slot into Stevenson’s old chief mechanic role. That’s a lot of Milton Keynes muscle memory moving under one roof, and not by accident. Audi has targeted operational excellence as a differentiator while the new 2026 regulations shake the competitive order. Hiring people who’ve lived at the sharp end of the sport’s processes is the fastest way to close the gap to those who’ve been winning them.
It’s an approach that says plenty about where Audi thinks the early wins are. You can’t shortcut wind tunnel time or conjure instant power from a brand-new hybrid unit, but you can drill stops, refine turnaround routines, and squeeze out the inefficiencies that cost positions over a race distance. Audi’s first on-track laps in Barcelona were a statement of momentum; staffing the garage with serial overachievers suggests they intend to keep it.
For Stevenson, the move is a neat full circle. He began in F1 as a mechanic with Jordan in 2000, long before the Silverstone team morphed into today’s Aston Martin. He joined Red Bull in 2006, grew with the project through the V8 era into the turbo-hybrid reset, and helped underpin Verstappen’s championship juggernaut. Hinwil now becomes the third act — a well-drilled, engineering-led operation that’s historically punched above its weight, now backed by a German manufacturer with real intent.
Audi’s 2026 entry arrives as the sport pivots to a lower-drag philosophy, a chunkier electrical deployment, and sustainable fuels. Against that upheaval, 2025 is a holding pattern for much of the grid, but not for Hinwil. The factory is being retooled, the org chart rewritten, and the personnel roster sharpened. Stevenson’s elevation is the latest signal that Audi won’t wait for lights out in ’26 to get serious.
It’s tempting to read all of this through the Verstappen prism — and plenty will — but the bigger picture is Audi building a culture. You recruit people who expect to win and let that expectation seep into everything from how the car’s built to how the wheel guns are staged. Wheatley brought the blueprint. Stevenson and Caller bring the muscle memory. Together, they bring a standard.
The rest of the field will keep an eye on the lap times when testing starts to matter. The smart ones will watch the choreography in the Audi garage just as closely. That’s where races are so often won now — in tenths, not tenths of horsepower. And Audi, clearly, knows exactly who to ask for those.
