The detail focus that will make Audi’s Red Bull hire a hit team boss

Ask anyone in the Formula 1 paddock and you’ll get the same response – Jonathan Wheatley is a detail man. His obsessive pursuit of perfection puts him in the same niche as another team boss who entered motorsport via the workshop floor: Ron Dennis.

“I’ve known him since my karting days,” David Coulthard tells GP Racing. Latterly DC worked with Wheatley in the mid-2000s as they helped Christian Horner build Red Bull Racing from midfielder to championship contender.

“Back in the 80s, Jonathan was a mechanic for a guy called David Cuff – and he always used to wear white gloves when he was mechanicing… which was obviously unheard of at that time! Because karting was dirty and oily and everything, but he just figured out that having clean hands was a good thing.

“I’ve known Jonathan since we were teenagers, and he always stood out from an early age – because he just did things a little bit differently. Very meticulous.”

F1 is long past the era when teams were run by the person whose name was above the factory door. Bosses are now employees themselves, servants of higher powers – but while many of these in recent years have come from a commercial background or been company men, increasingly they’re from an engineering background, either promoted internally or recruited from outside.

Wheatley’s background is, however, very different. Having started out as a mechanic at Benetton in the early 1990s, he rose through the ranks, eventually reaching the position of Red Bull’s sporting director and team manager.

Wheatley started his career with Benetton and has accumulated vast experience in the pitlane

Photo by: Rainer Schlegelmilch

His Audi appointment makes a lot of sense. During the Italian Grand Prix weekend Audi’s CEO Gernot Dollner, facing the media for the first time since sacking Andreas Seidl and Oliver Hoffmann, outlined how the new leader duo will operate: while Mattia Binotto, who has already started working at Hinwil and was present with Dollner in Monza, will largely oversee the work at the factory, Wheatley is supposed to run things on track.

And there’s arguably hardly anyone better for the job, since Wheatley’s varied experience of all sorts of F1 roles, beginning as Benetton’s rear jackman, gives him a broad yet detailed understanding of every aspect of
a team’s trackside operations.  

I’d rather jack

In a video interview with DC, organised by Red Bull a few years ago, Wheatley recalled one of his first jobs in Formula 1: “I was selected for my first pitstop by the chief mechanic going [Wheatley reaches out and feels Coulthard’s bicep] ‘rear jack’. That was based on strength alone. It was Magny-Cours – my first pitstop in 1991. And I practised, and the car obviously
had no fuel in it. [But then] it came in, I think, quite early on in the race, maybe lap two, full
of fuel, and I was just dangling off the jack –
I couldn’t even lift the car in the air, so somebody else had to come over and do it.”

"He looks at every little thing. And that’s probably why he’s been so successful because with him nothing falls through the cracks" Graham Watson

Over the next few years, Wheatley would
not only learn how to actually hoist the car
off the ground, but would also get promotion after promotion in the team.

“I joined Benetton in 1996,” says his former colleague and one-time Toro Rosso and AlphaTauri sporting director Graham Watson. “I was on the test team. Jonathan’s on the race team. And back in those days, [it was] just
after the period of Michael Schumacher, so
they – Jon Wheatley, Paul Howard and all
these others, really – were like mega guys.
And I was privileged enough to actually see Jonathan’s career progress.

“And here’s a true story about Jon’s attention to detail – from one of the first days I worked with him as my boss, when he was the chief mechanic of the test team. I flew back to the
UK on Sunday night after the Monaco Grand Prix because the number-one mechanic of the test team had had an accident, so I needed to replace him. And Jon wanted us at the circuit
at 7am on Monday morning.

“So I landed at I don’t know what time, slept a couple of hours, arrived at the circuit, walked into the garage… And Jon looks at me and says, ‘Oi – the top button on your collar’s not done up.’ And that’s the attention to detail of Jonathan.

Wheatley's scrupulous attention to detail has been a constant feature of his career

Photo by: Sutton Images

“He looks at every little thing. And that’s probably why he’s been so successful because with him nothing falls through the cracks. You know, people are talking about Adrian Newey… Trust me, Jon Wheatley is a big part of that company [Red Bull Racing].”

After joining Red Bull in 2006, Wheatley
used his Enstone-accumulated experience to assemble what is considered the strongest pitcrew in post-refuelling F1. It’s thanks to him Red Bull is now famous for its lightning tyre-change stops – having broken the two-second barrier a few years ago.

Everything changes

“You know, I look back to some of my notes from back in 2009, early 2010,” Wheatley said to DC in the aforementioned video interview, “and really it was complete blue-sky thinking at that time.

“We went through every single aspect of it, literally every single aspect – and we had a real motivation: young, keen group of people. We made a massive step, a huge step between the historical pitstops of the refuelling era and then creating the new standards for [F1 as a whole] – and I feel very proud about that.

“I really didn’t spend a lot of time looking at other people’s pitstops [back then]. Because, to be frank, for a long time, nobody was really close to us.”

Until in-race refuelling was banned for the 2010 season, wheel changes could be relatively leisurely because pitstop length was determined by how much fuel was going in at the mandated 12 litres per second. Now the wheel change alone determined how long the car was stationary – and Wheatley was the first to make this quicker through technological and human-performance improvements.

In January 2010 the current editor of GP Racing, then a freelancer, was assigned by the Red Bulletin – Red Bull’s in-house magazine – to cover an intensive two-day ‘boot camp’ organised by Wheatley at the Bisham Abbey elite sports centre. There, as well as team-building exercises, the pitcrew was professionally coached through strength and flexibility routines and reaction drills. The article was spiked pre-publication because the team didn’t want to give away any secrets.

For many years Red Bull has been the gold standard in pitstops, thanks largely to the work initiated by Wheatley

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Watson, in his capacity as team manager and sporting director of Red Bull’s sister team, knows all too well the scope of Red Bull’s pitstop achievements – since the Faenza team largely used the same equipment.

“People think you get all the right kit and you have lightning-quick pitstops,” he says. “I know that’s completely not true. I’ve been there. I’ve been at Toro Rosso, and worked with those guys for those years, trying to get them to be more consistent...

“What he [Wheatley] has done there [at Red Bull] is exceptional. And it’s not just that they’ve done it on a one-off year. They have consecutively and consistently done that for years now. And that’s all about his leadership, it’s about his motivation, it’s about getting 
people to focus. He’s a huge part of that.

"Because of his background, he has such a broad understanding of the business. You can’t really sit there and argue with him" Graham Watson

“Jonathan led the way in pitstops. He’s led the way in the physical training, in the psychological approach. It’s all been coming out of that team. And they [other teams] have all had to think, ‘Shit, we need to up our game’.

“And he’s also very clever – when he sees other teams doing something different, he analyses it really quickly, understands what it is that they’re doing, and does it at the next level. With that super attention to detail, to a level that would blow most people’s minds.”

Under the influence

In Wheatley, Audi will also be getting a man
with a knowledge of the rulebook bordering on eidetic recall. This may not sound glamorous
but its effective deployment in crunch situations can be transformative.

“Again, because of his background, he has such a broad understanding of the business,” says Watson. “You can’t really sit there and argue with him. With sporting regulations, there are guys who have been in the sport a long, long time, and a lot of the regulations are written in a way that you just don’t understand... You read it and you go, ‘How the hell did that become a regulation? And what does it mean?’

Pictured with late FIA delegate Charlie Whiting, Sauber will be getting an individual who knows when to pick battles over matters of the rulebook

Photo by: Sutton Images

“And then you sit down with people like Alan Permane, Jon Wheatley, Steve Nielsen, and 
they say, ‘Well, in 1991 so and so did this. And then...’ And you go, ‘Oh my God’.”

However you feel about what transpired, it is inescapable that Wheatley also played an important role in Max Verstappen winning the title in that controversial 2021 battle. It was Wheatley who had been negotiating with Michael Masi and dealing with the stewards throughout that whole campaign, including in Abu Dhabi – when it was maybe Wheatley using the right words at the right time, and in a sufficiently lawyerly manner, which swayed the FIA’s race director into making that controversial call…

“When the announcement came for his new position in ’26 I texted him immediately,” says Watson, “and I said, ‘John, look, I don’t think there’s anybody in the paddock I can think of is more deserving than you getting this job’. He’s given his life to sport. I’ve been here 28 years
and he’s been here much longer than me.

“I don’t see any reason he won’t succeed. He’s got all the attributes. And he’s very clever because he can talk at all levels. If he’s talking with a garage technician or one of the mechanics he’ll talk the way he needs to talk there, and if he’s talking at sort of next level – he can find the right words and the right way to deliver the message. It’s a quality that a lot of people don’t have, and maybe myself sometimes, too.”

Many believe that it is Wheatley, not Newey, whose loss will be felt most keenly by Red Bull. Watson certainly does.

“100%,” he says. “Jon doesn’t believe me when I tell him this, but I learned the majority of what I took from when I left Benetton – after five-six years I think it was – to my next team from working with him. And we worked closely together a lot in the winter on pit equipment and things. And when we worked together on the test team, we had a very similar ethos – and I learned so much from him.

“When I went to Toro Rosso, I just took what I learned from my Benetton days – and it’s a successful fingerprint, it’s a DNA that works, and pretty much how all the teams work in the pitlane now. And when I see the way Red Bull works, it is very much Jonathan, You can see the Jonathan imprint all around the whole place.”

As a former colleague, Coulthard has every faith in Wheatley to get the job done

Photo by: Gareth Bumstead

A lot will change for Wheatley himself, too. It’s not just a new role, but a role at a team in transition, in a crisis that’s almost deeper than that of the Jaguar team whose ashes became
Red Bull Racing.

“It’s different now for Jonathan as an older man going into Audi/Sauber,” says Coulthard, “but he’s got that knowledge and experience now. He’s obviously operationally well-known within the paddock, so I have no doubt he’ll make that role his own, and inevitably there’ll need to be changes because the team can’t just hide behind not having a budget and everything.

“In F1 everything matters. That’s the reality. Some people think only certain things matter. But everything matters, and you’ve got to prioritise how you fix things. And Jonathan
will methodically make sure he puts the
right people in place.

“It’s going to be a big challenge to do that in Switzerland [where Sauber is based], with all the challenges that come with being outside of the UK. But I have no doubt he’ll leave his fingerprint on that and be successful.

“I’ve got to declare that we’re friends. But it doesn’t surprise me that he’s been on this journey. Because his style and his attention to detail have always been something that set him apart from others.”

Going by Sauber’s form right now, the move
to Hinwil is Wheatley’s greatest challenge yet.

Can Wheatley lift Sauber into more than the bit-part player it has been in 2024?

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images