The 2025 Formula 1 season is starting to gear up with all the teams anticipating a competitive season in the top four.
This is largely due to the fact that the regulations have stayed the same year-on-year, allowing teams further back to catch up to their rivals and the top four to converge in performance.
It is still expected to be a two-tier formula, with Alpine and Williams looking odds on favourites to break into the regular top five finishers.
With all the teams set to be broadly competitive, there is one team that everyone in the F1 paddock thinks will be the slowest of the year according to journalist Edd Straw, when speaking on The Race podcast.
Nobody had any ‘good words’ to say about Sauber’ 2025 car
One of the worst teams of the 2024 season was Sauber, who very nearly repeated their pointless 2014 season 10 years on with Zhou Guanyu and Valtteri Bottas.
The team is in a transitional period as it gears up to become Audi next year, but the last two years have been dire for the Swiss outfit having finished last in the Constructors’ Championship.
Their 2025 car is very much a continuation of that form, with Straw outlining the grim reality facing the team when they rock up to the first race in Melbourne.
“A lot of glum faces in Sauber with Nico Hulkenberg and rookie Gabriel Bortoleto,” said Straw.
“We’ve not had a good word to say about them in pre-season, nobody really has had any good words to say about them. They look resoundingly last.”
Sauber’s season could be better than anticipated with mix of Nico Hulkenberg and Gabriele Bortoleto
Sauber will take an all-new lineup into the 2025 season in the form of the experienced Nico Hulkenberg and F2 champion Gabriel Bortoleto.
Bortoleto is seen as one of the next great talents to come out of Brazil, having went head-to-head with Racing Bulls Isack Hadjar for the F2 title which went down to the final race in Abu Dhabi.
READ MORE: Sauber driver Nico Hulkenberg’s life outside F1 from wife to height
Hulkenberg will provide the perfect mix of experience, having been rated highly by his former engineer at Haas for being one of the best qualifiers on the grid.
The key problem that faces both drivers is whether they can convert decent qualifying positions into points on Sunday, with them likely to slip back in the competitive order given they were slowest in the race runs during pre-season testing.
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