Formula 1's greatest team debuts as Audi scores in first race

It was a statement of overwhelming superiority from a marque returning to racing after a 15-year absence.

The W196, designed by the brilliant Rudolf Uhlenhaut, was a genuinely revolutionary car, featuring a straight-eight engine, inboard drum brakes, and a streamlined body that shocked the paddock.

The car was so advanced that rivals struggled to comprehend how it could be legal, let alone beaten.

The car was the result of a methodical, lavishly resourced programme that left absolutely nothing to chance, and the Reims result showed it.

Mercedes would dominate F1 that year and again in 1955, before withdrawing following the Le Mans disaster.

March Engineering (1970 South African GP)

Few origin stories in Formula 1 are as audacious as that of March Engineering.

The team was the brainchild of four young men: Max Mosley, Alan Rees, Graham Coaker, and Robin Herd who each invested £2,500 to get the project off the ground, operating out of a modest unit on a Bicester industrial estate.

Their ambition was wildly disproportionate to their resources: they intended to design, build, and race a competitive F1 car from scratch, and to do it in months rather than years.

As Mosley himself later recalled, the feeling in the pitlane was that March was somehow taking liberties and that serious Formula 1 teams simply were not built this way.

At the 1970 South African Grand Prix in Kyalami, however, the scale of what they had achieved became undeniable. Jackie Stewart and Chris Amon — both in Marches — occupied the entire front row.

“You could feel the hostility,” said Mosley. “People thought we were taking the piss.”

There was also a personal subplot: Mosley had driven to Geneva the previous summer to try to sign Jochen Rindt as March’s lead driver, only to be waved away as a hopeless dreamer.

Now, at Kyalami, Rindt had qualified fourth in a Lotus — and when the two men caught each other’s eye on the grid before the start, a great deal was communicated without a word being spoken.

The race itself did not quite match the billing. Stewart slipped to third, and Amon retired early with mechanical trouble, as was his unfortunate habit, but the day emphatically belonged to March regardless.

The debut remains one of the most stunning in Formula 1 history.

Walter Wolf Racing (1977 Argentina GP)

There is a particular kind of Formula 1 story that seems almost too good to be true. A wealthy outsider arrives, assembles a small and motivated team, fields a great driver, and wins on debut.

Walter Wolf Racing’s first race in 1977 is precisely that story, and the fact that it is entirely true only makes it more satisfying.

Walter Wolf was a Canadian oil magnate of Slovenian origin who had spent a season as a co-owner of the Williams team in 1976, an experience that left him dissatisfied with the arrangement.

For 1977, he bought out Frank Williams’s share of the assets and started afresh, recruiting Harvey Postlethwaite to build him a proper racing car and signing Jody Scheckter, one of the quickest drivers of the era, to lead the effort.

At the Argentine Grand Prix in Buenos Aires, Scheckter drove the Wolf WR1 to a commanding victory. It was not a lucky win: Scheckter led for much of the race and crossed the line ahead of a competitive field.

The team would go on to win twice more that season and challenge seriously for the championship.

Wolf entered 48 races before its owner decided to sell the team in 1979.

Sauber (1993 South African GP)

Peter Sauber had spent years building one of the most respected sports car programmes in the world, winning at Le Mans and developing a close partnership with Mercedes-Benz.

When he finally brought his team to Formula 1 in 1993, he did so with Mercedes power, albeit wearing the name of Ilmor, the engines’ manufacturer, for reasons of corporate politics – and with the backing and resources that came with it.

Even so, scoring points on debut was no certainty.

The 1993 South African Grand Prix was, even by Formula 1 standards, a chaotic and brutal afternoon.

Of the 26 cars that started at Kyalami, 19 retired. Into that carnage, Sauber arrived and immediately looked at home. JJ Lehto qualified sixth on the grid, with team-mate Karl Wendlinger 10th, and at the end of lap 1 both Saubers were running in the top six ahead of far more established machinery.

A gearbox problem would drop Lehto back and put him two laps down at one stage, leaving him to haul himself back through the wreckage of other people’s misfortunes. Which he did.

As the rain arrived in the closing laps and the remaining cars began to slide off one by one, Lehto found himself scrapping with Derek Warwick‘s Footwork for what turned out to be fifth place.

On the penultimate lap, with the circuit flooded and visibility close to nil, Lehto forced his way past, and Warwick, unable to respond, lost control and hit the barriers.

What gives Sauber’s debut a special resonance, viewed from the vantage point of 2026, is what came after.

The team would remain in Formula 1 continuously for more than three decades, surviving ownership changes, financial crises, and the endless turbulence of the sport’s commercial landscape. Through all of it — as Sauber, BMW Sauber, as Alfa Romeo — the operation in Hinwil endured.

And it is that same entry, that same set of people in that same building in the Swiss countryside, that Audi has now taken over.

Toyota (2002 Australian GP)

Toyota’s arrival in Formula 1 in 2002 was, by almost any measure, a significant event. Here was one of the largest and most powerful automotive companies in the world, committing to a full works programme with a budget that made the existing teams nervous and ambitions that were stated in the plainest possible terms.

The Japanese car maker had spent years preparing at its purpose-built facility in Cologne, and it had recruited experienced personnel from across the paddock, arriving at the 2002 Australian Grand Prix ready to make an impression.

The race itself was a lottery, and Toyota drew a reasonable ticket.

Williams’ Ralf Schumacher vaulted over Rubens Barrichello‘s Ferrari at the first corner, triggering a multi-car accident that eliminated eight cars on the spot and brought out the safety car for four laps.

When the dust settled, Toyota had survived unscathed — Mika Salo threading through the wreckage to find himself suddenly running in clean air, his path to points unexpectedly clear.

The Finn pitted after the first-lap chaos and spent three minutes stationary while a damaged rear track rod was repaired. He rejoined at the back, laps down on the leaders, and drove as hard as the repaired car would allow.

As attrition thinned the field, Salo picked his way through the remains of a race that had broken nearly everyone else. In the closing laps, he hunted down Mark Webber‘s Minardi for fifth, and — with Webber’s car missing top gear and the Toyota closing fast — nearly had him at the flag.

Salo spun trying to pass on the penultimate lap, and had to be content with sixth. One point. The first time since Sauber in 1993 that a new constructor had scored on debut.

The truth, however, was that Toyota’s debut proved to be the high-water mark of its early ambition.

Red Bull Racing (2005 Australian GP)

When Dietrich Mateschitz purchased the Jaguar team at the end of 2004 and rebranded it as Red Bull Racing, the reaction in the paddock was one of polite scepticism.

Energy drink companies had dabbled in motor sport before, but they had not attempted to build championship-winning teams.

In Melbourne in 2005, David Coulthard and Christian Klien qualified fifth and sixth on a rain-soaked grid. When the lights went out, Coulthard immediately moved up to third, outsprinting Webber into the first corner and holding off Fernando Alonso‘s faster Renault for 15 laps.

Klien, meanwhile, sat patiently in sixth, stroking the car around and keeping himself out of trouble.

Alonso’s Renault was eventually too quick to be denied, and Coulthard slipped down the order.

Both Red Bulls were still running when the chequered flag fell, Coulthard fourth and Klien seventh, giving the team seven points in its very first race.

Coulthard, asked whether he had been right to join Red Bull, smiled and said the team would win a championship one day.

It would take five years, and the contribution of a different driver, but he was not wrong.

Brawn GP (2009 Australian GP)

No debut in Formula 1 history carries quite the same emotional charge as Brawn GP’s first race in 2009.

It wasn’t simply a new team arriving with money and fresh ambitions. This was a team that had ceased to exist on a Friday afternoon and, by some combination of ingenuity, determination, and Ross Brawn’s extraordinary force of will, found itself racing — and winning — a matter of weeks later.

In Melbourne, the BGP 001, a car that had been unnamed and ownerless four months earlier, locked out the front row and led every single lap.

Jenson Button‘s start was clean and his pace was dominant. Rubens Barrichello almost stalled on the grid, dropped to the back, and spent the race picking his way through the field, ultimately finishing second.

It was not without its dramas: a botched left-rear wheel change at Button’s second stop cost him vital seconds, and for a heart-stopping moment it looked as though the lead might be lost. It wasn’t. The gap was too big, the car too quick, and Button too composed.

Behind Button, the race was chaotic: a safety car intervention for Kazuki Nakajima’s crash, then, late on, a collision between Sebastian Vettel and Robert Kubica that destroyed both their front wings and sent them into the barriers, necessitating a safety car finish.

Button crossed the line behind the safety car, arm raised from the cockpit, leading a 1-2 for a team that had not existed at Christmas.

Brawn GP won six of the first seven races that season. Button took the drivers’ championship; the team took the constructors’ title. It remains the only time in F1 history that a team has won the championship in its first and only season of existence.

Haas (2016 Australian GP)

Gene Haas had built one of the most successful teams in NASCAR history, but Formula 1 was a different proposition entirely.

When Haas joined the grid in 2016, the conventional wisdom held that an American constructor with limited Formula 1 experience would need at least a few seasons before results came.

But the 2016 Australian GP handed Haas a slice of fortune, and the team took it with both hands.

Early on, Alonso’s McLaren clipped the rear of Esteban Gutiérrez’s Haas and was launched into a spectacular barrel-roll crash that brought out the red flag, eliminating Gutiérrez but gifting Haas’s Romain Grosjean, who had yet to stop, a free tyre change during the suspension.

He rejoined on fresh mediums, without losing his position, and found himself ninth when the race resumed. From there, Grosjean drove superbly, working his way forward through an incident-strewn field, managing his tyres and keeping his head as others around him made mistakes.

When the positions had settled, Grosjean was sixth, ahead of established midfield machinery from Force India, Williams, and Toro Rosso.

He later described the result as feeling like a victory. Grosjean had started 19th on the grid — the team having been caught out by the new elimination qualifying format that had been introduced that very weekend and promptly abandoned. He finished 13 positions higher on merit.