Everything Sauber can learn from Red Bull’s winning ways

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” as the famous Peter Drucker quote goes.

As a karting mechanic, Jonathan Wheatley wore white gloves. As Red Bull’s sporting director, he was the drill instructor who hustled Formula 1’s fastest pit crew.

And now, as team principal at Sauber, his task is to help transform one of the smallest teams on the grid into a squad worthy of carrying Audi’s four-ringed logo into F1.

For him that journey began the week of the Japanese Grand Prix this year, when his period of gardening leave from Red Bull ended, although Sauber itself has been locked in a peculiar transition period ever since it was announced that Audi was buying in.

Last July Audi in effect rebooted the project, hiring ex-Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto as chief operating officer and chief technical officer and disposing of CEO Andreas Seidl and chairman Oliver Hoffmann.

While it’s common for teams under new management to talk of requiring considerable investment in infrastructure to boost their prospects, Wheatley is emphatic that culture does much of the heavy lifting in the march to victory.

“I’ve found this at every point in my career, and every time I’ve had a chance to be involved in the transition of a team,” he told F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast.

Jonathan Wheatley, Team Principal of Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber

Photo by: Sauber

“It’s creating the right environment for people to thrive – and that environment is absolutely vital, because you can have the best simulators, you can have the best wind tunnel, you can have the best machinery.

“But if everyone walks out at the factory, all you’ve got is equipment. It’s the people that make the team.”

Wheatley rose up the ranks as a mechanic at Benetton, latterly Renault, before taking what amounted to a leap of faith when he joined Red Bull in 2005.

At that point, the Enstone team was on its way to Fernando Alonso’s two consecutive world championships; Red Bull had just bought Jaguar Racing, the butt of jokes in the paddock after several years of over-promising and hugely under-delivering.

Even after the acquisition, Red Bull was viewed with such disdain by the establishment that McLaren boss Ron Dennis didn’t deem it necessary to hold Adrian Newey to gardening leave when he announced he would be moving there.

But for Wheatley, the sporting director role at Renault was unlikely to fall vacant any time soon (Steve Nielsen would remain in that post until the end of 2011), so Red Bull represented an opportunity to prove himself at a team in transition.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Colin McMaster

The first few seasons were a slog until Newey had restructured the engineering team to his liking and produced a competitive car. 

“I can see immediately there’s some short-term support that I can give the [Sauber] team,” said Wheatley.

“I can see where some current procedures, processes, reporting structures could maybe be adapted a little bit, make sure people understand exactly what their role is.

“I’m incredibly fortunate to be sat here having played my part in those – it’s 154 – race wins over my time [at Benetton/Renault as well as Red Bull], and the seven back-to-back DHL pitstop championships.

“Now, I say played my part, because an enormous group of people has to come together to make any of those things happen.

“I had a choice in my career at one point where I could decide whether I went down the chief engineer route or the team manager route.

“And where my energy comes from is from a team environment, a team that’s buzzing full of energy, full of creative ideas, knowing exactly how to channel them.

“I see my job then as helping people achieve those dreams and helping them achieve those ambitions, guiding people on the journey and that energy of working with an excited Formula 1 team. There’s nothing like it in the world.”

Mattia Binotto, Team Principal, Ferrari, with Jonathan Wheatley, Team Manager, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

There are those who believe Red Bull will come to miss Wheatley’s influence as much as, if not more than, it will miss Newey, who left for Aston Martin last year.

Wheatley’s perfectionism and determination to explore the limits of human performance resulted in Red Bull’s pitcrew acquiring a reputation for incredible speed and reliability – one undented by the recent equipment malfunction in Bahrain.

In 2020 Wheatley’s Red Bull mechanics pulled off the incredible achievement of repairing Max Verstappen’s car in time to take the start after Max slid into the barriers during his lap to the grid of the Hungarian Grand Prix.

“When I see the way Red Bull works, it is very much Jonathan,” former Racing Bulls sporting director Graham Watson told GP Racing magazine in 2024. “You can see the whole Jonathan imprint all around the place.” 

“I think that pitstop performance is almost a manifestation of team spirit,” said Wheatley. “Because you’ve got 22 people. They all think differently. They all come from different backgrounds.

“They all have different ambitions and drives and pressures and problems in their life.

“You have to create an environment where those people can perform again and again and again, that they can deal with pressure, they have the confidence to believe that they’re best in what they’re doing. I’ve done every one of those jobs. I’ve been them.”