Steven Petrik
Audi Salary
Race Engineer to Nico Hülkenberg
Steven Petrik's F1 Salary With Hülkenberg at Audi
F1 Salaries puts Steven Petrik’s base salary at £100k-180k ($133k-239k), our band for a race engineer at Audi. Bonus money of £10k-54k ($13k-72k) lifts the annual figure to £110k-234k ($146k-310k).
It’s the band Bryan Bozzi holds at Ferrari, and their careers run close. Both were Ferrari performance engineers who became race engineers in May 2024, Bozzi on Charles Leclerc’s car and Petrik on Valtteri Bottas’s at Sauber. Audi doesn’t publish his pay.
Anonymous survey of motorsport pay that informs Petrik's race engineer band and the bonus range shown here.
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Insider · Issue 23
01 · The Last Race
Singapore by Salary
Pos
Driver
Pts
Salary
1
Max Verstappen
Red Bull
25
$70m
2
Charles Leclerc
Ferrari
18
$34m
3
Kimi Antonelli
Mercedes
15
$3.4m
4
Lando Norris
McLaren
12
$30m
5
Oscar Piastri
McLaren
10
$13m
6
Insider+
7
Insider+
Our Take · Insider+
What Each Point Now Costs Red Bull
How Petrik Runs Hülkenberg's Side of the Audi Garage
Petrik has been Nico Hülkenberg‘s race engineer since the German joined Sauber in 2025. He coordinates the setup work on car 27, takes Hülkenberg’s feedback after every run and is the voice on his radio during races.
Their partnership produced Hülkenberg’s first F1 podium, third at the 2025 British Grand Prix, in his 239th start. Petrik came to Sauber in early 2024 as a senior performance engineer and moved onto Bottas’s car that May. Audi’s arrival as the team name for 2026 didn’t change the pairing or his employer.
Secondary timeline of his Ferrari, Sauber, and Audi roles, including his education at Virginia Tech and Oxford Brookes.
The 2026 race engineer guide that lists Petrik on Hülkenberg's car at Audi.
Carries Ferrari's release naming Petrik as American and as performance engineer to Carlos Sainz.
Petrik and the Engineers on His Former Drivers' Cars
Two engineers now look after drivers Petrik once worked with. Gaëtan Jego engineers Carlos Sainz at Williams and John Howard has Valtteri Bottas at Cadillac, and both sit on the £100k-180k ($133k-239k) band that most F1 race engineers share with Petrik.
Steven Petrik's Route Through Ferrari to Audi
Nine years at Ferrari, the last five on Sebastian Vettel’s and then Carlos Sainz’s cars, gave the American the grounding for his first race engineering job at Sauber.
Petrik Compared With the Rest of Audi
At Audi, the gap between a race engineer and the technical director is wide. James Key is on £500k-2m ($663k-2.7m), more than ten times the top of Petrik’s band, while Jose Manuel Lopez, on Bortoleto’s car, shares Petrik’s band.
Steven Petrik FAQs and Quick Answers
Nico Hülkenberg’s race engineer at Audi is Steven Petrik. The American joined Sauber in early 2024 after nine years at Ferrari, engineered Valtteri Bottas for the rest of that season and has been on Hülkenberg’s car since 2025, including the German’s first podium at Silverstone.
Steven Petrik is American, not Slovak. Ferrari’s release on its engineering academy identified him as American, and he studied mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech in the US before moving to England for postgraduate study. Any page that calls him Slovak has his nationality wrong.
Steven Petrik studied at Oxford Brookes University, not the University of Oxford. His master’s there was in racing engine design, and Oxford Brookes is a separate institution in the same city. Before that he took a mechanical engineering degree at Virginia Tech, and Ferrari’s engineering academy took him on in 2015.
A race engineer’s band of £100k-180k ($133k-239k) is F1 Salaries’ figure for Steven Petrik’s base salary, with a bonus of £10k-54k ($13k-72k) on top. That makes £110k-234k ($146k-310k) a year. Audi doesn’t disclose race engineers’ pay, and nobody has put a credible figure on his net worth.
Yes, Steven Petrik was performance engineer on Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari in 2019 and 2020, the German’s last two seasons with the team. He then did the same job for Carlos Sainz from 2021 to 2023, a spell that included Sainz’s first Grand Prix win at Silverstone in 2022.