Audi has officially pulled the cover off the R26 Concept, a striking preview of how the brand intends to enter Formula 1 next season. Unveiled at the Audi Brand Experience Center in Münich, the R26 serves as the visual and philosophical bridge between Audi’s new design direction and its ambitions in the world’s most-watched motorsport. With 115 days to go before the team’s first Grand Prix, the concept introduces a leaner, sharper, and more assertive Audi.
CEO Gernot Döllner describes the moment as more than a milestone. It is a declaration. “We are not entering Formula 1 just to be there. We want to win,” he says. That ambition fuels Audi’s broader brand renewal, where F1 becomes both catalyst and proving ground. The roadmap is steep but clear: develop steadily, challenge relentlessly, and fight for a World Championship by 2030.
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Audi’s Formula 1 team will do more than race. It will lead the company’s brand identity into a new era. The R26 Concept is the first public expression of this shift, translating Audi’s recently introduced design philosophy into a competitive motorsport form. Carried through the R26 are surfaces, geometric discipline and high technical intentionality that define its appearance. The concept car’s palette — titanium, carbon black and a bold new Audi red — forms the basis of a visual language that will extend across the team, its partners, and eventually into Audi’s production lineup. Even the rings themselves enter a new phase, with red rings appearing selectively to underscore the significance of the F1 program.
Chief Creative Officer Massimo Frascella calls the R26 a pioneer, the first point where the brand’s future design direction meets a most global stage. In his view, Formula 1 offers the perfect platform to apply Audi’s four principles: clear, technical, intelligent and emotional. The appearance of the R26 reflects those values through its minimalist graphics that appear to be quite a contrast from the F1 grid’s status quo. Disciplined surfaces appear carved directly from the car’s aerodynamics.
As a business and cultural project, Formula 1 is equally significant. With more than 820 million fans and billions in team valuations, the sport offers unrivaled reach in the motorsport sector. Audi enters with strong momentum: global partners adidas, bp and upcoming title partner Revolut are already on board, drawn by the team’s long-term vision and the stability of F1’s cost cap era. Thanks to that cost cap, the program operates within a defined financial framework, offering both predictability and strategic opportunity.
Audi’s commitment includes its full acquisition of the Sauber Group in Switzerland, now the home of the Audi F1 Team. Over time, the move brought Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund into the project and installed Formula 1 leaders Mattia Binotto and Jonathan Wheatley at the helm and with a mandate to build a competitive team. On track, Nico Hülkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto will combine experience and energy as the first driver pairing of the Audi era.
Importantly, the R26 Concept represents Audi’s future ambitions while offering the next chapter in the brand’s established motorsport legacy. From pioneering mid-engine racers of the Silver Arrows era to quattro dominance in rallying, to bold innovations at Le Mans, in Formula E and at Dakar, Audi has repeatedly used motorsport as a testbed for breakthrough technologies. Formula 1 now becomes the ultimate extension of that lineage.
The timing also helps Audi F1 as newcomer. The 2026 regulation overhaul — affecting everything from energy recovery to aerodynamics — levels the playing field and grants teams like Audi a rare opportunity to enter without carrying years of legacy architecture. For Audi, that reset aligns perfectly with its push toward sustainable mobility, electric performance and the development of e-fuels, all of which are central to the 2026 F1 rulebook.
The R26 Concept is not the race car. That will arrive in January. Instead, it is a concept meant to signal how Audi intends to show up on the grid. It also appears to be much closer in form to the 2026 F1 car formula, unlike the current 2025 Sauber C45 or previously-harked Audi F1 display car that traces its design to 2022.
The livery itself is also quite interesting. Like the Radical Simplicity design language shown on Concept C, the scheme appears to be devoid of unnecessary details. And while that’s perhaps easier to do in these weeks before sponsor logos need to be affixed and busy it all up, the distinctive color scheme is worth showing. It strikes a much different tone than liveries more common on the grid today. Combined with unique racing colors, no doubt fans will not have a hard time picking the Audi F1 car out of a pack of competitors racing towards Turn 1 on the start.
Will the final race livery keep much of these details? We don’t yet know, but this certainly marks an intriguing teaser of what we can expect.
The countdown has begun.
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