Gabriel Bortoleto had a more than positive outcome in his first race wearing Audi’s colors in Formula 1. This Sunday (8) at the Australian GP, the Brazilian crossed the finish line in ninth place and finished the first race of the 2026 season within the points zone.
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The competitor lined up in tenth position on the starting grid at Albert Park and throughout the race controlled the pace to stay within the top 10. In the final stage, already in ninth, he managed to close in on Arvid Lindblad, but even without completing the overtake, he celebrated the more than good result.
“It was intense, obviously everything very new with these regulations, with this energy issue. I think it was new for everyone, this question of where to overtake, how to overtake, I knew the start would be difficult, we have suffered a lot with our starts since practice, the way we program the starts is still not where we need to be, we lost many positions,” he told Globo after the race.
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“But I knew the pace would be good, we were recovering, we made some good strategies, we managed to stop twice to put on two sets of new tires. It’s a shame that at the end I ended up catching some cars that were somewhat out of the race in the middle of the race, it ended up hindering me a bit in catching Lindblad, I had a bit of an advantage over him,” he continued.
“But still, ninth in the first race for Audi is something I would have signed up for if they had told me at the beginning of the year that we would have reached it. It’s incredible to score points in the first round with so much that we still need to improve, clearly within the team we know that there are many basic things to be fixed, but to start like this is incredible,” he added.
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