Allan McNish Says He’s Become a ‘Second Dad’ to Audi’s Rising Young Drivers

• Audi Racing Director Allan McNish also oversees the team’s Driver Development Programme, which currently supports two prospects: Formula 3 racer Freddie Slater and F1 Academy driver Emma Felbermayr
• Both young drivers describe McNish as a father figure, with Slater calling him “a second dad” who helps them work through each race weekend
• McNish says the programme carries what he calls a “moral obligation” to prepare young drivers for life beyond racing, not just for a seat on the Formula 1 grid

Audi launched its Driver Development Programme in January this year, ahead of the team’s first season as a full works outfit in Formula 1. The man running it is Allan McNish, the former Toyota F1 driver who now also serves as the team’s Racing Director following Jonathan Wheatley’s departure earlier this year.

Two young drivers currently sit inside the programme: Britain’s Freddie Slater, competing in Formula 3, and Austria’s Emma Felbermayr, in her second season with F1 Academy. Former F1 Academy racer Carrie Schreiner works alongside them as a mentor. Both Slater and Felbermayr describe McNish in strikingly similar terms, as someone who has become close to a parental figure in their careers, and McNish himself speaks of the role in terms that go well past results on a timing sheet.

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A Plan Years in the Making

McNish traces the origins of the programme back to 2023, long before Audi’s cars reached a grid. “When we were looking at Formula 1, and general planning concepts, it was quite clear that one key part, and a key part that I know very well, is the driver,” he said. “The driver is not just [someone] driving fast, they’re also a kind of leader within the team. They’re the ones that can be positive in the environment, but also sometimes it can be the other way, but it was quite clear that we need to be in a position, if we’re wanting to be serious and fight at the top level, to actually have the right drivers involved in our programme.”

“I looked very early on, back in 2023 actually, about how we could set up a driver programme, what it would look like, what the general positioning is and the ethos,” he said. “That was all put in place as a plan and then through 2024, and especially 2025, we started to execute that particular plan ready for 2026.” He describes the programme as something that keeps changing shape rather than running on a fixed script. “I would say it’s a living organism. It’s not something that you set up and then it just runs like that. It obviously has to evolve.”

What Life Inside the Programme Looks Like

Audi has added extra support around McNish after the programme launched, including Giampaolo Dall’Ara, who worked as the team’s Head of Race Engineering last season and has now moved across to help with driver development.

Slater described how that support shows up in practice. “Obviously they provide a lot of experiences or things behind the scenes, media training and things like this, and we evaluate after every race weekend how it went with Audi people and with Allan as well,” he said. “Allan is very experienced so we get to have good conversations with him about how the weekend went, what can we improve on, what we help with, all these sorts of things. For me, like I say a lot, my goal is to become better every single day and they give me the opportunity to do that.”

Felbermayr pointed to a different side of the support, built around her body rather than her driving. “We get support from medics, getting the whole body scanned at the beginning of the year to know where you are, and then just building on that during the season to get stronger every day,” she said. “Now I’m really happy with my physical strength for that category but it gets harder and harder if you go further so that’s something that helped me quite a lot.”

Felbermayr also has Schreiner to call on, a driver who raced in F1 Academy herself and now mentors her through it. “When I went into the first season [of F1 Academy] last year, I didn’t really know what to expect,” Felbermayr said. “I remember the first race weekend, I didn’t know what’s going on, what we were doing, and Carrie was a big support just to prepare myself a bit better. We have regular calls [and] we became friends. She’s always there for me during the race weekend.”

Room to Make Mistakes

McNish said part of his job is making sure young drivers are allowed to get things wrong without it derailing them, pointing to Audi’s own Gabriel Bortoleto as an example of how quickly a driver can change. “Gabi was actually on my original list [for the programme],” he said. “Gabi and Freddie were on that original list, and he had just started F3. There were six drivers that I was sort of [looking at] and two of them are with us now, so it’s quite nice actually. But Gabi has evolved a lot in the last 24 months that I’ve known him and he’s already been in Formula 1.”

“You can never put an old head on young shoulders, but you can definitely support them to try and make the right mistakes because they will make mistakes,” he added. “Everybody makes mistakes, I still make mistakes. Nico [Hulkenberg] makes mistakes, Gabi makes mistakes. It’s about how you deal with them. It’s like a long, long university in a way.”

McNish also spoke about pacing how much attention a young driver takes on. “It’s a very hard balance because it’s very individual,” he said. “I think I got it wrong personally when I was in my junior career at times, and that was before there was any work-life balance or mental health discussion, there was nothing like that at all. It was a very different era.” He pointed to Felbermayr’s introduction to the sport’s attention as an example: “Last year we really didn’t do very much in and around our social media. In fact, we proactively reduced it at the beginning. It was a case of trying to make sure that we brought it forward at the right time when she was ready to take it on, rather than overloading from day one.”

The ‘Second Dad’

Ask Slater or Felbermayr what McNish is like to work with and the language turns personal rather quickly. “Allan was the first person I spoke to [at Audi] and he’s always been a bit like a second dad at some points as well,” Slater said. “He’s helping me understand the way motorsport works and the way you should be thinking because he’s been through it all. To have someone like Allan to have a conversation with about the race, after a weekend or wherever it is, is really valuable for me to listen to.”

Felbermayr agreed, and pointed to a lighter side of the relationship too. “It’s really easy to talk to him. Having a relationship and also having fun, that’s really easy with him and that’s also part of it,” she said. “Without having fun on track, in the car, fun is part of being a driver in my opinion. If you don’t have fun, [then] it’s not going well or if you lose joy in what you’re doing, you know?”

McNish, told how Slater sees him, laughed off any concern about stepping on toes at home. “His first dad is okay, I can tell you!” he said. “[Both of Freddie and Emma’s dads] have got a bit of racing blood inside them and the whole family, Mrs Felbermayr and Mrs Slater as well. They’re supporting their children. I remember back to my mum and dad driving me up and down the roads. DC [David Coulthard] and I were from the same area and our parents would drive us up and down for seven hours to go to bloomin’ Clay Pigeon [Raceway] or Rye House [Kart Raceway] on a freezing cold December day.”

He said watching that kind of family commitment up close shapes how seriously he takes the role. “There’s a lot of commitment by parents, and yes there is an element we have in our objectives, which is related to performance, but we also have got a little bit of a moral obligation,” McNish said. “Everybody that’s involved in the project is living and breathing it more than necessarily a job. We’re actually involved and taking care of it as if it was a very delicate egg.”

McNish also drew on his own experience of being shut out early in his career to explain why he takes the responsibility personally. “I remember having doors slammed in my face and not really knowing why and thinking, ‘I’m a good driver’,” he said. “There is a point where I think we as an industry maybe have not always done it as well as some of the other sports, but at the same time we are obviously a performance-driven industry, and I think every driver understands that’s the key part of it.”

Splitting Time Between Two Jobs

McNish now runs the Driver Development Programme alongside his role as Audi’s Racing Director, a job he took on after Wheatley’s exit earlier this year. He joked that balancing both roles echoes the same work-life question he raises with Slater and Felbermayr. “I can’t get involved with the level of detail that I did before, but at the same time the people we’ve got in our eco-system are well capable of doing it with or without me if I’m very honest with you,” he said. “It’s not a job. For me, being here early is not really something that I see as an obligation. It’s because I want to do it. I want to see how our drivers are, and our drivers are not just Nico and Gabi, it’s the width of drivers from top to bottom.”

Looking ahead, McNish said the programme has two clear aims: producing a driver capable of racing in Formula 1, and helping its drivers win in F1 Academy along the way. “Now, we need to also then have the next Emma and the next Freddie coming through and that’s what we’re targeting at the moment,” he said. “That’s the next stage of development, the next Emma and the next Freddie. That’s not to replace, but to complement.”

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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