Audi start weakness leaves Bortoleto braced for loss

Gabriel Bortoleto said Audi was "most likely" going to lose positions again at the start in Montreal after both Audi cars dropped places off the line in the Sprint, laying bare the launch and drivability weakness that kept the team from turning near-miss qualifying pace into points.

After qualifying, Bortoleto gave a blunt assessment of what he expected from the Canadian Grand Prix start. "Most likely we're going to lose positions again tomorrow, unless everyone behind me fucks it up at the start and I do a mega start. It's true! What can I do?" the Audi driver said. He added that the issue was known inside the team rather than something he was trying to pin on one area. "I'm not going to lie, be the optimistic here and then tomorrow we lose positions. It's something we are working on, it's clear, it's not pointing fingers, it's just a problem we have that we need to work [on]."

The Sprint had already shown exactly what he meant. Bortoleto lost three positions before Turn 1 when his engine revs dropped as the lights went out, then suffered another major hesitation after the first chicane when the gearbox stalled badly. By the end of lap two, he had run into his teammate. Nico Hülkenberg's launch was better, but only "essentially okay," and he still lost ground in a race that quickly exposed Audi's inability to get away cleanly.

That was especially costly because Audi had enough pace over one lap to put itself in the top-10 fight. In Sprint qualifying, Hülkenberg was 11th and Bortoleto 12th, split by just 0.04 seconds. In main qualifying, Hülkenberg again missed Q3 in 11th, this time by 0.029 seconds, while Bortoleto took 13th and was 0.214 seconds short.

Both drivers pointed to the same underlying problem. Bortoleto said after qualifying, "We are suffering a lot with power unit driveability, with power, that we need to work and improve." Hülkenberg made a similar diagnosis, saying, "The main topic really was the drivability and the engine side, and this circuit exposes these areas quite a bit."

Bortoleto was also unhappy with his own qualifying session, saying he did not feel Audi had maximized what it had. He said he was "very unhappy with the session," describing the car as "sliding all over the place" and "like driving on ice," with little confidence under braking and harsh downshifts. Even so, the bigger theme of Audi's weekend was that the car could get close enough to the top 10 to matter, only for its weaknesses in launch phase and driveability to undo that work when it counted.

The Sprint result underlined the damage. Hülkenberg fell to 15th after a 10-second penalty for keeping position after leaving the track while defending from Liam Lawson, and Bortoleto only rose to 12th because of other incidents and pit stops. For a team that had spent the weekend hovering within hundredths of the final qualifying cut, Montreal again showed that Audi's immediate fight is not just finding more pace, but making the car usable enough to stop losing races in the first few seconds.