Racing
© Spencer
Audi’s 2026 Formula 1 campaign left Miami defined by another non-start, another disqualification and Nico Hülkenberg retiring on lap seven stuck in first gear, extending a run of six failures, non-participations or exclusions in the team’s first six appearances of the season.
Across four Grands Prix and two Sprints, Audi has already lost Hülkenberg before the start in Australia, during the China Sprint and before the Miami Sprint, while Gabriel Bortoleto failed to start the China Grand Prix and was later disqualified from the Miami Sprint for excessive engine intake air pressure. Hülkenberg has also retired twice before the finish, in the China Sprint and in Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix. In total, the R26 has failed to start three times, retired twice on track and been excluded once after the fact.
Miami brought that pattern into sharp focus. Hülkenberg’s car caught fire at the rear on the way to the Sprint grid and never took the start on Saturday. Bortoleto then lost his result through disqualification. On Sunday, Hülkenberg stopped after seven laps when onboard footage showed the car stranded in first gear on the long straight before turn 17, with the team eventually telling him to switch it off near pit entry.
Audi has offered only broad references to technical problems, and that lack of detail has drawn criticism. Former Formula 1 driver Christian Danner, speaking in a report for AvD Motorsport-Magazin, said: “That really leaves a bad taste for me personally. Nobody says what is going on. The whole thing is disguised as a technical incident. I find that unlikeable.” He added that while top teams do not reveal every detail, “there is still a fair degree of honesty in the information. I miss that at Audi.”
Danner believes the more important issue is where the failures are coming from. His main theory is that Audi’s weakness lies in either hydraulics or the gearbox, particularly in launch conditions. “It is either the hydraulics or the gearbox,” he said, linking that suspicion to the repeated poor starts by Hülkenberg and Bortoleto.
He also pointed to a possible gearbox explanation for the launch problems and Miami retirement. “I was always particularly bad off the line when first gear was too long. I can imagine that this is a simple problem in the gearbox,” Danner said. That matches reports of jerky shifting from Audi’s drivers and Sunday’s failure, when Hülkenberg’s R26 appeared to be locked in first gear.
Danner said Audi may still be struggling to perfect its seamless-shift gearbox, a system rival manufacturers have spent years refining. “Ferrari or Mercedes have been building these gearboxes for 12 years. It is a very special technology that has to be mastered,” he said, adding that this does not mean Audi cannot solve it.
Hydraulics remain the other major suspect. Danner said he was drawn to that conclusion when Hülkenberg’s car burned at the rear on its way to the Sprint grid in Miami. “For me, that was hydraulic fluid on the exhaust, as it usually is. Some kind of oil, and since it was not the engine, I would guess hydraulic fluid, without knowing for sure,” he said.
That theory matters because Audi is running as a full works operation and had to build the complete system itself for 2026. The hydraulics operate multiple core functions, from brakes and steering to the gearbox, so a weakness there could affect several parts of the R26 at once. Danner warned that fixing it may take time, even if he is convinced Audi will eventually get on top of it.
Audi race director Allan McNish has acknowledged the scale of the problem without tying the failures to one repeating fault. After Miami, he called reliability the team’s clear priority. “We need reliability,” McNish said. “Definitely, we need to tidy those, there’s no question about it.” On Hülkenberg’s Saturday non-start, he added: “The frustrating part is not having two cars at the start on Saturday.”
McNish said Hülkenberg had been “clearly on course for points” on Sunday before the latest retirement, but Audi now heads to Montreal with its pace overshadowed by a reliability record that has become the central story of its first season as a works team.