Sauber Speaks On Preparations For Audi Collaboration In 2026

Sunday, 10 December 2023 at 19:00

Sauber (known as Alfa Romeo in 2023) team representative Alessandro Alunni Bravi recently addressed the progress in preparations for the transformation of the team.

At the end of the 2023 season, Sauber's collaboration with Alfa Romeo ended, and the team lost its title sponsor for the upcoming two seasons.

Sauber has been and will be, until the end of the 2025 season, one of the customer teams of Scuderia Ferrari. This means the team purchases the power units from the Italian team.

However, everything is set to change as Sauber will transform into a works team (the team that manufactures its own engines) from the 2026 season, thanks to its new collaboration with Audi.

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The team has been pretty quiet about the details of the collaboration throughout the 2023 season because it wanted to be respectful to its former title sponsor, but at the end of the season, Alessandro Alunni Bravi shared some new details. As reported by RacingNews365, he said:

"We have started transforming our organisational structure to become a works team, and this is impacting all the departments including the technical and commercial side. We have put a lot of actions to work already towards our race to 2026."

So many organizational changes might be one of the causes for the team's weak performance during the 2023 season. Bravi continued:

"It is important that Audi understands Sauber's structure and weaknesses. My experience is mainly in working with manufacturers, so the process of finding out the requirements lies with Andreas."

In January 2023, Andreas Seidl left the McLaren F1 team from his position of team principal to become Sauber's new CEO. One of his main jobs will be handling the challenging transition of the team.

"He has a huge experience working at Porsche Motorsport and teams like McLaren. The goal and the vision is perfectly shared by us, but we need to improve and add more people not just in terms of labour, but we need to bring more quality in each department."

Sauber is currently far behind the leading teams in Formula One, and the team representative admitted it is almost unrealistic for the team to dream about challenging for the title in 2026. Bravi concluded:

"If we arrive in 2026 expecting to fight for a championship, then we are dreamers, but we don't need to be dreamers. We need to be realistic, the competition's really strong. But we want to be competitive in 2026.