Scott Gulbransen
The Japanese Grand Prix hasn’t even started and two teams are already making news for all the wrong reasons.
Jonathan Wheatley is out at Audi. Just two races into what was supposed to be a landmark debut season for the German manufacturer in F1, the team principal who shepherded the old Sauber operation through its rebrand is gone — officially for personal reasons, which is the kind of statement that invites more questions than it answers. Mattia Binotto, already serving as overall head of the Audi F1 project, has absorbed the team principal duties in the meantime while the team figures out its next move.
Is Audi’s Old Boss Going to be the New Boss at Aston Martin?
The timing, of course, isn’t coincidental. Aston Martin has been looking for a dedicated team principal to take the day-to-day burden off Adrian Newey, who never seemed particularly enthusiastic about the administrative side of the role and made it fairly clear the position was effectively a gap-filler. Wheatley and Newey go back decades — they spent years together at Red Bull winning championships, and Wheatley’s background in race-weekend execution is precisely what Aston Martin lacks right now. Whether gardening leave delays the move remains unclear, but the dots connect pretty neatly.
For Audi, losing Wheatley is a genuine headache. He was the continuity between Sauber and the new works team identity — the institutional knowledge walking out the door ten months after he arrived. Bortoleto scored points in Australia in the team’s very first race, so it’s not like the operation is falling apart. But Binotto now holds both jobs while they sort out a longer-term structure, and that’s not ideal for anyone heading into a season when Audi is still learning what its own car actually needs.
Aston Martin’s situation, though, is something else entirely.
The Mess at Aston Martin is Substantial
Neither Alonso nor Stroll has finished a race in 2026. Not one. The Honda power unit is producing vibrations severe enough that Newey told the media in Australia that Alonso felt he couldn’t safely complete more than 25 consecutive laps without risking permanent nerve damage to his hands. Stroll’s threshold was even lower, at 15 laps. These are not the kind of problems you paper over with a management reshuffle.
The roots of it run deeper than a bad engine spec. When Honda recommitted to F1 at the end of 2022, much of its original engineering group had already moved on and Newey later admitted he didn’t learn how inexperienced the reconstituted Honda team actually was until November of last year, when he and Lawrence Stroll traveled to Tokyo after rumors surfaced that Honda wouldn’t hit their original power targets for race one. By then, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.
Newey’s fingerprints are on the timeline, too. Honda’s project general manager said Newey requested a two-tier battery configuration to meet packaging requirements, which left them running out of time. Building a works engine partnership from scratch under new regulations is hard enough without last-minute design changes from your own technical partner.
Lawrence Stroll issued a rare public statement this week, insisting Newey remains central to the operation and that Aston Martin “does not currently adopt the traditional team principal role.” That framed the structure as intentional rather than chaotic. That’s a difficult sell when both your drivers are sitting in cars they can barely finish a race in.
What makes all of this particularly awkward is the venue. Suzuka is Honda’s home race. The Japanese manufacturer will have its own people in the grandstands this weekend, watching the power unit that has made its works partner the worst team on the grid through two rounds. The regulations don’t allow Honda to make meaningful development changes until after Miami in May, which means Alonso and Stroll head into Japan knowing the fundamental problem isn’t getting fixed this weekend, no matter what happens in the management structure above them.
Two teams, two sets of problems. One of them can probably weather it. The other one is going to need more than a new team principal.
