Audi F1 restores the CEO chair at its Neuburg power unit division, Thomas Fuhr takes charge

What matters most in Audi's press release this week is not an engine specification. It is a job title. Thomas Fuhr becomes CEO of Audi Formula Racing GmbH, the Neuburg-based division where Audi has built its first Formula 1 power unit from the ground up. And the post is not new. It is the same post Audi deleted from its engine division at the start of 2026, when the then-CEO Adam Baker left the organisation. A line was rubbed off the org chart, and it stayed off for more than a year. Now the line is back, and there is a name written on it. The letter with the postmark arrived after the confetti had been swept. The first real engine built to the 2026 regulations went to a circuit, when the car faced its first genuine engineering examination across a grand prix weekend, and only then did the company remember that a chair in Neuburg was empty. That delay is the actual story. I have watched this pattern repeat for years — decisions arrive after the podium photograph, never before it. Paperwork runs on a slower clock than feeling. Neuburg now has three clearly drawn responsibilities. Stefan Dreyer, chief technical director, will focus fully on leading the technical development of the power unit, which is the company's own phrasing. Christian Foyer, COO, continues to oversee day-to-day operations at the plant. And now above them sits Fuhr, looking at organisation, people and process. Audi describes this as an addition to the existing team, not a replacement. Fuhr's CV makes the appointment both ordinary and unusual. More than thirty years of industry experience. Managing director of Mercedes-AMG High Performance Powertrains from 2026 to 2026 — Brixworth, that same factory, in the very window when Mercedes was preparing its return as a factory team and laying the foundation for the 2026 hybrid era. Then senior positions at manufacturing giants GROHE and LIXIL, and most recently chief technology officer at Georg Fischer Building Flow Solutions, leading international engineering and manufacturing organisations. Mattia Binotto's quote is worth reading twice. The Audi F1 CEO and team principal said strong foundations have been built in Neuburg, that Audi's first Formula 1 power unit was developed from the ground up, and that because Fuhr understands both the technical challenge and what it takes to build and lead high-performing teams, he will play a key role by further developing the team and its organisation. Fuhr's own statement runs the same way — the Neuburg team developed an entirely new power unit and brought it to the track, and he wants to build on that by bringing together expertise across the organisation. Both statements talk about organisation far more than about engines. That is the clearest signal in the announcement. I have to go back a bit here. In 2026, when I was handling marketing and sponsorship at Force India, the meetings we held with engine suppliers repeated one line — buying an engine is easy, building one is like changing an organisation. As a customer team you deal with a specification, a delivery window and an invoice. As a manufacturer you need a department that speaks three languages at once: engineering, manufacturing and politics. A power unit project is never only a technical project. It is an industrial organisation that must answer to a shrinking deadline every single week. What is distinctive about the Neuburg story is that it is entirely new ground. Audi announced its Formula 1 entry in August 2026, took one hundred per cent ownership of Sauber, and decided at the same time that the engine would be its own — built in Germany, not Britain. That was the same period in which the 2026 regulations had already been published: the MGU-H goes, the split between combustion and electrical power becomes roughly even, the fuel is fully sustainable, and total output sits near a thousand horsepower. Audi carried no advantage from decades of old technology. It started from zero, and that was both its biggest risk and its biggest opening. So why does an engine division need a CEO? The answer comes in three layers. First, bandwidth. Binotto wears two hats, Audi F1 CEO and team principal. The chassis work at Hinwil, race weekend operations, driver management, sponsors, media, and now performance pressure in a regulatory cycle where every team must find its place. Amid all of that, Neuburg's daily management needs its own head, and that head should be someone who can enter a technical argument rather than only receive reports. Fuhr's profile fits exactly that slot. Second, cost control. Financial regulations now apply to power unit manufacturers as well, capping what can be spent. The direct consequence is that money cannot buy strength. When money is capped, what separates organisations is speed — how fast a design change reaches the dyno, how fast a failure's cause is identified, how quickly two departments converge on one decision. A man who spent three decades inside large manufacturing organisations is a specialist in precisely these things. That is why Binotto's language was about developing the team and its organisation, not about making the engine faster. Third, institutional memory. What Fuhr saw at Brixworth between 2026 and 2026 was the most interesting transition in modern F1 history. Mercedes was moving from customer engine supplier to factory team while, on the other side, a completely new power unit for the 2026 hybrid rules was being developed. The organisation that went through that turn went on to win eight consecutive constructors' titles from 2026 to 2026. It would be a stretch to credit Fuhr personally — he had left by 2026. It is not a stretch to say that the kind of experience Audi prioritised is exactly the kind that helps a manufacturer standing at zero in a new regulatory cycle: not copying somebody else's success, but building the organisation in which success can be repeated. One thing needs clarifying, because this news is being misread in two directions. The first reading says Audi is panicking after a first season weaker than expected. The second says Binotto is being diminished, with someone placed above or beside him. Both are surface readings, and both make the same mistake: they read an org chart emotionally rather than from the document. For a start, a panicking company does not hire a thirty-year veteran from large manufacturing organisations with a stable reputation. Panic hires the man who can start tomorrow and owes nothing to anyone. Fuhr's profile is the opposite — it is a profile that stabilises institutions. Second, Binotto losing the daily burden of Neuburg is not a loss of power but a concentration of it. For a team principal already carrying two roles, this is relief, not demotion. The real question nobody asked is whether a three-headed structure can work. Dreyer on technology, Foyer on operations, Fuhr on organisation. A matrix like this functions only when the boundaries are clear from day one. If Fuhr gradually begins entering technical decisions, or if Dreyer feels his work now travels through somebody else's desk, this structure will generate friction within six months. Formula 1 is full of examples where a good engineer and a good manager were each excellent separately and average together. Audi's real examination will not be of the engine but of the meetings. There is another dimension that is easy to miss when watching from India. Neuburg is in Germany, Hinwil is in Switzerland, and race operations run separately from both. When we talk about a team's factory, we usually picture one building. In reality it is a bargain between three cities, three working cultures and three time zones. Audi's German factory culture runs on consensus; Formula 1 culture demands decisions by Sunday. Bridging that gap is not the technical director's job. It is the CEO's. Perhaps that is why the post came back. I asked around, because the record never says who was in the room. When Adam Baker left at the start of 2026, the post was removed — a decision, not an accident. Somebody determined that Neuburg did not need a CEO and that Dreyer and Foyer could carry it together. That decision has now been reversed. The reversal is itself a document: the organisation has accepted that a third space existed between technical leadership and operational leadership, and that it must be filled. The quietest weekends leave the loudest names. This story will read as dull to anyone opening their feed hoping for something to happen on track. No overtake, no controversy, no penalty. Just a name and a title. Yet in Formula 1 the verdict on the next three years is often hidden in exactly this kind of item. The teams that moved ahead or fell behind in the 2026 rules showed the difference on track, but it was built in the factory — in the order of meetings, in the speed of response, and in whose voice gets heard. The three questions that came into my six-hundred-member WhatsApp group were predictable. Does this mean the engine is bad? Is Binotto leaving? And what difference does this make to us, we only watch the races. The third question is the most honest and its answer is the most direct: on the day a team's engine division cannot find its own CEO, two years later that team's car stops running in a straight line. Organisational trouble always reaches the track late, but it does reach it. Somewhere in the six hundred, someone kept the receipt — someone remembered that the post had been removed in 2026. That is how I work. I do not connect results; I connect the dates of decisions. Entry announced in August 2026. CEO post abolished at the start of 2026. First real season under the 2026 rules. And now, mid-season, the post restored. What that sequence shows is that Audi first bet on technology, then on organisation. The company first believed the hard part was building the engine, and now accepts that running it is harder still. Anyone treating this as a staff notice is missing something. A power unit in Formula 1 is no longer purely an engineering contest. It is a square of manufacturing discipline, supply chain, cost control and regulatory compliance with an engine placed in the middle. Mercedes-AMG HPP, Honda, Renault, Ferrari — all of them learned over the past decade that the team which wins in organisation wins in the engine. Audi is learning the same lesson now, and its method of learning is to hire the man from that same school. One more point, watching from the Gulf, because this is the market we live in, with a floodlit grand prix every year and room made for every new team. When a major manufacturer restores a CEO to its engine division, it is not only talking about itself. It is telling the whole grid that it is here for the long game. A manufacturer preparing to leave does not fill senior posts — it leaves them empty and closes the books. This appointment should be read through intent, not through results. Audi's intent still runs past 2030. What to watch next. First, whether headcount at Neuburg grows. Bringing in a CEO is usually the first step of a larger reorganisation, not the last. Second, whether Fuhr appears in the paddock on race weekends. An engine chief who stays only in the factory never closes the feedback loop between track and plant. Third, whether Dreyer's role remains what the announcement says it is, or whether another layer appears beneath him within six months. Fourth, and most important, whether the rest of the 2026 season shows a visible change in the engine's reliability and delivery. Proof of organisational change never arrives in a press release; it arrives the next time a car stops, or the next time it does not. What happened in Neuburg is the story of a chair brought back. Bringing the chair back is the easy part. The hard part is deciding what the man sitting in it actually owns — the design, the budget, or merely the meeting agenda. If the third answer turns out to be true, this appointment will end up as one more layer of management. And if the first answer is true, then we have read a piece of news today whose effect will show up on a timing sheet in 2028. In Formula 1, dates always talk to each other. The question is whether we want to listen.