We’re roughly a year and a half from Audi showing up in full force on the F1 grid, and it already seems like a mess.
It was announced on Tuesday, July 23, that Mattia Binotto will be effectively taking over the Audi F1 project. Andreas Seidl and Oliver Hoffmann, who had led the team as the CEO of Sauber (Seidl) and the Chairman of the Board (Hoffmann), are no longer with the company.
The tea leaves indicate that Audi chose neither side in a power struggle between Seidl and Hoffmann and instead chose a third party.
All well and good until you look at Binotto’s resume.
Ferrari under Binotto was such an absolute joke that people still see the team as a bunch of clowns. Binotto’s Ferrari was entirely unprepared and would routinely fail to adapt strategically, even when graced with the fastest car.
It’s solid that Binotto is an engineer by trade, and his oversight should at least be recognized for how fast the Ferrari was at the start of the current car era in 2022. But, having a fast car is not the only thing a team needs to be fast, and Binotto falls short in most other categories.
In addition, Ferrari’s speed fell to the wayside as the season progressed, and the team struggled to find any balance in managing tire wear.
The hiring makes even less sense, even if you choose to throw Binotto’s record aside and have faith he can build something new at Audi.
Audi has already made a number of hires under Seidl that Binotto will now have to either work with or cycle out, wasting more time on a project that already seems behind schedule.
The most notable of these will be Nico Hulkenberg. Seidl hired the German to drive for the team mostly thanks to their previous relationship in sports cars, which enabled them to win the 2015 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Now that Seidl is out of the picture, Hulkenberg is going into the team totally blind.
“That was obviously a bit of a wave, a bit of a shock,” Hulkenberg said on Thursday, July 25 on Belgium Grand Prix media day as quoted by ESPN. “But now, obviously, it’s back to business. And I still look forward to join that project, and to make it a successful story with or without the fact that two people that were closely involved signing me are not there anymore.
“[…] But I was informed, the day of the announcement about the group’s decision by [Audi CEO] Gernot Donner himself. It’s the group’s decision that they want to change moving…
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