Sauber’s 10 key moments across its 600 F1 GP starts

Sauber will, across its various guises, celebrate its 600th Formula 1 grand prix at Imola – if we count the races between 2019 and 2023 when it competed as Alfa Romeo. And we should, given it was still ostensibly operated by Sauber Motorsport AG…

In that time, the Hinwil outfit has enjoyed precipitous highs and some disastrous lows – some that very nearly put it out of business around a decade ago. Yet it survived, and will metamorphose into Audi next season.

To celebrate 600 races, we’ve picked out Sauber’s most important moments. They’re not all highlights per se, but instead a microcosm of its journey as a team.

1993 South African GP – Lehto scores debut points after reliability disaster-class

Never mind that Sauber initially came in with the plan of fronting a Mercedes works team – the disclaimer of “concept by” in front of the Mercedes-Benz badging on the engine cover merely stated that it was anything but. Despite tentative Mercedes support in the cut and thrust of the season, Sauber made a splash when it jumped into F1 after years of success in the World Sportscar Championship.

First noteworthy thing about that: the Sauber C12 truly was a thing of beauty. With a design directed by Harvey Postlethwaite, the team draped the shapely C12 in an all-black livery barely tainted by the presence of sponsors; amid the context of the era, one might have surmised that the team’s finances might not have been in particularly healthy shape, particularly as the team sprouted up while a whole grid’s worth of outfits had gone bust in recent years. That was until the cars, piloted by JJ Lehto and Karl Wendlinger, hit the track.

It became immediately obvious that the C12 was quick. Both cars broke into the top 10 on the grid for the Kyalami season opener with Lehto sixth – albeit almost three seconds off Alain Prost’s 1m15.696s pole time – and Wendlinger a further three tenths back in 10th. Karl Wendlinger’s monster (and illegal) start and Damon Hill’s spin had the Saubers up to fourth and fifth by the end of the first lap, although the Austrian had a stop-go penalty to serve for jumping the gun.

There were, however, teething problems with the new car; Lehto stopped at the end of lap six with an apparent gearbox control system issue, which cost him two laps, and Wendlinger had his own electrical issues and retired a little under halfway through the race.

But Lehto got his just desserts later; with excellent pace, the Finn drove exquisitely to ensure he was not lapped by the frontrunners any further. Next, he kept the car going and, amid the attrition, found himself within the points in the final laps when Derek Warwick spun off. He then upgraded sixth into fifth when Gerhard Berger’s Ferrari powerplant gave up the ghost.

1995 Italian GP – Frentzen claims first Sauber podium

By 1995, Sauber had consolidated its position in Formula 1. It had scored 12 points in each of its two seasons thus far, although it hadn’t entirely avoided the ‘difficult second album’ when Karl Wendlinger suffered a horrific practice accident at Monaco and was ruled out of the rest of the season. The Austrian had returned for 1995, but the after-effects of his crash in the previous year meant that he was a shadow of his former self. It was up to Heinz-Harald Frentzen to lead the line, as Wendlinger and Sauber reluctantly decided to part ways and Jean-Christophe Boullion was well off the German’s pace.

Sauber and Mercedes had also split after a lengthy association; Mercedes went to McLaren, and so Sauber began a works relationship with Ford – effectively a marriage of convenience, as Benetton had defected to Renault power.

Frentzen took the first-ever Red Bull-liveried Sauber to a glut of points-scoring finishes, opening with three points in the opening three races. And the points continued to slowly rack up, keeping the team in a battle with Ligier and Jordan over fifth – perhaps even with McLaren for fourth – in the constructors’ championship. But, where Ligier clinched a podium at that year’s Belgian GP courtesy of Martin Brundle, as Jordan had already managed a 2-3 result at Montreal, Sauber was yet to ever make the step onto the rostrum.

It didn’t necessarily look like Monza was going to provide that, especially when the 10th-starting Frentzen was mugged off the line by Brundle and Eddie Irvine. But there was a surprising level of attrition among the frontrunners; polesitter Coulthard had already collected a stay of execution when his formation-lap spin ultimately went unpunished, although a wheel issue later knocked him out of the reckoning.

Damon Hill nerfed Michael Schumacher off the road when the two were lapping Taki Inoue, then later, both Ferraris endured their own weird retirements; Jean Alesi’s on-board camera fell off and wiped out Berger’s front-left suspension, with the Frenchman retiring later on.

This rewarded Frentzen with a handful of positions during the race, but the Moenchengladbach native had also re-passed Brundle early-doors and then moved past Irvine and Mark Blundell with a well-timed pit call that offered a neatly wrapped undercut. By the flag, and thanks to Alesi’s late retirement, this was enough for third place, behind Johnny Herbert and Mika Hakkinen.

1997 Hungarian GP – Herbert is third wheel in Villeneuve/Hill scuffle

Although Sauber lost its works Ford deal to Stewart after just two seasons, it at least managed to secure an engine contract that effectively lasted either side of its BMW interregnum – doing a deal with Ferrari to take on its ’96 engines, and have them branded by Petronas.

That year’s C16 was a pretty handy car too, one that Johnny Herbert took to a series of impressive results – the Briton qualified in the top eight in four of the opening five races. Herbert scored all of that year’s points, save for the sole point that Nicola Larini managed in the Australia opener; Herbert might have been on for a good result Down Under and was set to challenge for third in the opening corner after a bright start. Eddie Irvine thought otherwise, and Herbert became collateral in the Irvine/Villeneuve clash at Turn 1.

Herbert had been lucky in securing his first podium for the team in 1996, which emerged in that year’s Monaco Grand Prix, but his efforts at the Hungaroring in 1997 were far more worthy of silverware. On a day when the Bridgestone runners found more performance in high temperatures while the Goodyears were hit-or-miss, Herbert managed to find a groove with the American brand’s tyres – starting by overtaking both Benettons on the opening lap. The three-stopping Ferraris yielded further track position, as Herbert was just as quick as Schumacher to ensure there was no advantage to be gained from stopping one more time.

When Coulthard retired from third, Herbert bagged the first podium of the Sauber-Ferrari relationship to join Jacques Villeneuve and Damon Hill – the latter missing out on victory due to an oil pressure issue on the last lap. This was Herbert’s final podium for the team, as 1998 proved to be a torrid year for the Essex-born racer.

2001 Australian GP – Double points finish sets up competitive year

Sauber had regressed in the years after 1997. Jean Alesi’s 1998 Spa-Francorchamps podium was the only rostrum visit across the following three seasons, and the team had become a byword for ‘unambitious midfield outfit’ that struggled to attract drivers. Alesi left at the end of 1999 for Prost, Pedro Diniz hung up his helmet at the end of 2000, and Mika Salo decided he’d rather spend a year testing Toyota’s alpha F1 car than race for Sauber for 2001. Thus, Peter Sauber had to return to his roots of selecting young drivers, rather than prioritising experience.

First was McLaren junior Nick Heidfeld, who spent 2000 quietly impressing versus Alesi in a distinctly unreliable Prost. Many of F1’s midfield suspects were linked to the second seat – Alex Wurz, Ricardo Zonta et al., but Red Bull was keen to shoehorn its own junior product Enrique Bernoldi into the car. Instead, Sauber fielded a phonecall from Jenson Button’s manager David Robertson, who asked if he’d give a youngster by name of Kimi Raikkonen a go…

Raikkonen’s debut was preceded by the circumstance that he’d only driven in 23 single-seater races and thus would only be granted a provisional superlicence. His first race rather decreed that this was an irrelevance.

Heidfeld put his Sauber C20 10th on the grid, with Raikkonen taking 13th in his first F1 qualifying session. After Ralf Schumacher and Jacques Villeneuve had their unsettling crash early on, Heidfeld was already up to eighth – which became seventh when the safety car ended. Retirements for Hakkinen and Jarno Trulli later on into the race moved Heidfeld up to fifth at the flag. In the meantime, Raikkonen had his own adventures; an iffy start meant that he’d ceded a handful of positions on the opening tour but, once the safety car was cleared, he’d made up some ground. The Finn reeled off moves on Alesi, Button, then Fisichella in the subsequent laps, and at the flag had shaken out in seventh. But it wasn’t quite over; Olivier Panis then received a time penalty for overtaking under yellow flags, moving Heidfeld up to fourth and Raikkonen into sixth.

Sauber placed fourth in that year’s championship – a signficant turnaround following its regression either side of the turn of the millennium, and Raikkonen gazumped Heidfeld to take McLaren’s vacant seat in 2002 when Mika Hakkinen went on a sabbatical…

2006 Hungary GP – First BMW podium, first Kubica race

Various set pieces brought BMW and Sauber together, but the key one was the deterioration in relationship between BMW and Williams. Feeling it wanted more influence, BMW took its business (and engines) elsewhere, and bought a majority stake in Sauber – which was looking for new shareholders following the departure of Red Bull a few seasons prior. The Sauber name was retained to effectively minimise TV rights money faff.

After impressing BMW’s key figures during his brief foray at Williams in 2005, Nick Heidfeld was brought back to Sauber. For continuity, Jacques Villeneuve was retained following a middling season in which he was largely put in the shade by Ferrari-bound Felipe Massa. Although the 1997 champion bagged BMW’s first points as a factory team in Malaysia, he was severely outperformed by Heidfeld – and BMW had been looking for a way to bring promising reserve driver Robert Kubica into the car.

The reigning Formula Renault 3.5 Series champion, Kubica was making a name for himself as third driver at BMW, back when the rules permitted an extra car for certain teams on Fridays. And, when Villeneuve crashed at Hockenheim and came away from the incident with some minor pain, BMW chief Mario Thiessen decided this was enough of a reason to ‘rest’ the Canadian and gave Kubica a go in Hungary.

In a wet race, Heidfeld brought home the team’s headline result with third – behind first-time winner Jenson Button and McLaren stand-in Pedro de la Rosa. But arguably, the eyes were on Kubica; the Pole had outqualified his team-mate at the first time of asking, and had crossed the line in seventh to vindicate BMW’s decision to switch drivers.

His disqualification was the hair in the soup; Kubica’s car was underweight, and thus his two points were stricken from the record. Two rounds later, Kubica claimed his own podium at Monza. This demonstrated further vindication – even the most ardent Villeneuve fan could scarcely fight that argument.

2008 Canadian GP – Kubica’s (and Sauber’s) only F1 win

This is the highlight, surely. After bringing itself into contention for regular podiums in 2007, BMW raised its game significantly by 2008 and was good value to interlope between the Ferraris and McLarens should the circumstances allow. Thanks to McLaren’s disqualification from the 2007 standings, BMW had secured second in the constructors’ championship and optimistically hoped to go one better.

Although Heidfeld had led the way across 2007, Kubica now had the upper hand with the ’08 car. Heidfeld clinched second in the Australia opener, Kubica was second in Malaysia, and then scored third from pole in Bahrain. There was an ebb and flow to the early-season weekends; sometimes McLaren had the advantage, sometimes Ferrari – BMW was waiting for its own turn.

That arrived in Montreal, albeit with some intervention from Lewis Hamilton. The Briton led Kubica handily in the opening laps but, when Adrian Sutil crashed out at Turn 3 on the 16th lap, the pitlane had become popular as this coincided with the pit window opening. Hamilton had a slow stop versus Kubica and Ferrari’s Raikkonen and came out into the fast lane behind them – but this was in a period when the pit exit would invariably shut mid-race. As such, Raikkonen and Kubica were waiting at the exit – which Hamilton did not notice and effectively had the choice of which car to crash into as he got on the brakes too late.

He went into Raikkonen, and Nico Rosberg followed suit. This left Kubica damage free, and allowed him to pursue the new race leader – the one-stopping Heidfeld. Kubica, running to a two-stopper, caught and passed his team-mate, and then built up enough of a lead to ensure he was five seconds clear once he’d stopped for a second time. Nonetheless, BMW secured its first and only 1-2 finish – putting Kubica top of the drivers’ championship.

But the Pole’s hopes of maintaining the momentum scarcely came to pass; BMW chose to focus on 2009 in the second half of the year, much to Kubica’s chagrin. Still, his Montreal effort was impressive, given it came a year after his almighty barrel-roll at the same course.

2012 Malaysian GP – Perez almost beats Alonso to win

In the intervening years, BMW had built a poor 2009 car, agreed to sell the team to a company known as Qadbak Investments – which turned out to be a shell company with no tangible assets, and then eventually sold it back to Peter Sauber when the earlier deal was not completed on. It hilariously ran as “BMW Sauber-Ferrari” in 2010 and then returned to its old name for the following season, as it bedded itself back into the midfield with the exciting Kamui Kobayashi and rookie Sergio Perez.

Perez carved out a niche as a driver who was incredibly delicate with his tyres which, with 2012’s Pirellis, proved to be an incredibly valuable skill. That year, the rubber was incredibly variable – seven different drivers won in the opening seven races, although it could have very nearly been eight in eight had Perez gone one better in Malaysia and beaten Fernando Alonso.

The Mexican lined up ninth, with most of the field starting on intermediates – but the Sepang venue was much wetter than it looked, and Perez switched to the full wet tyre after the opening lap. Most persevered for a few more laps before it became more prudent to switch, which elevated Perez up to third, such was his greater grip on the blue-walled tyre.

On the ninth lap, the race was red-flagged as the conditions worsened – and restarted for a few more tours behind the safety car. When Button pitted for inters before the restart, Perez was up to second; and this briefly became the lead when Hamilton emulated his team-mate a lap later. Alonso followed Hamilton in, and the Briton’s dreadful stop ensured the Ferrari was ahead of both McLarens, Button having arguably stopped a lap too soon.

Perez struggled for traction through the first complex of corners, and this allowed Alonso to hang it out wide and out-drag the Sauber driver for the lead. The Ferrari driver then continued to build a lead, which hit its zenith on lap 30 (7.7s) before Perez started to come back at him. By the end of lap 34, the gap was 5.7s; by the end of lap 38, it was 2.3s. Clearly, the intermediates were running out of life on the Ferrari.

When Perez got to within a second, Alonso boxed for slicks and Sauber went a lap longer – a decision that didn’t pay off one iota, as its #15 car was now over seven seconds adrift. Despite Alonso’s tyre advantage in running on mediums and Perez on the hards, he very soon started to cut the gap once more and sat on the Spaniard’s tail by the end of lap 49. He had DRS for the start of lap 50 and looked like he was due to make a challenge, but a call from the team to minimise risk seemed to put Perez off his stride – he went wide at Turn 14, which ended his charge and left him to be content with second.

2015 Australian GP – Team shrugs off point-less 2014, and court case, for a big payday

Sauber had a reasonable 2013 as Nico Hulkenberg’s star rose in his initial sole season with the team, but 2014 was horrible; neither Adrian Sutil nor Esteban Gutierrez scored points, leaving the Swiss outfit scoreless for the first time. Furthermore, the team was in financial dire straits, not helped by slipping behind the Manor Marussia team in the constructors’ standings.

The team had to resort to two paying drivers for 2015 – Marcus Ericsson and Felipe Nasr. The thing was that it had already signed a driver who’d brought cash to the team, in its 2014 reserve Giedo van der Garde. The Dutchman understood that his contract for a race drive had not been honoured, and an arbitration in Switzerland sided with van der Garde. This was then taken to the Supreme Court of Victoria days before the opening round, with it upholding van der Garde’s claim to the seat; Sauber had attempted to fight the case on the basis the car could not be prepared for his frame in time, and then lost an appeal against the court’s ruling.

Van der Garde was even seen in the build-up to the Melbourne weekend in Ericsson’s overalls, although Sauber did not nominate him to drive at any stage. As such, it missed FP1 to avoid its assets being seized. Both Ericsson and Nasr took part in FP2 as van der Garde declined to race, and later was awarded around $16 million in exchange for cancelling his contract and returning any money paid by that stage.

This had threatened to overshadow Sauber’s strong start to the year but, by the time the weekend got going, the team was able to shine. In an attritional race that had claimed Kevin Magnussen (deputising for Alonso after his mystery testing crash), Valtteri Bottas (due to a back injury) and Daniil Kvyat before it even began, the retirement of both Lotuses helped Nasr up to sixth – which became fifth once he’d gazumped Carlos Sainz after an early safety car. Ericsson then dispatched Sainz late on to claim eighth. Having scored nothing in all of 2014, Sauber already had 14 points after the opening round.

2016 Brazil GP – Nasr’s points sink his own F1 career, but symbolic of Sauber survival

Sauber didn’t quite kick on after that; it was capable of good performances on its day in 2015, but lack of funds meant that it was difficult to develop into the season. The team then slumped again at the start of 2016 and was resigned to battle against the Manor team at the back of the order – even newcomers Haas had leapfrogged the teams at the rear. Thanks to the van der Garde payout and a lack of sponsors beyond those that Nasr and Ericsson had brought with them, Sauber appeared to be circling the drain

Pascal Wehrlein’s point for Manor at the Austrian Grand Prix damaged the Swiss team even further, as it remained scoreless for the vast majority of the season. But a saviour was in waiting; TetraPak billionaire Finn Rausing was one of a handful of investors involved in the Longbow Finance group that took over the team.

But it was still due to end the year without a point and, crucially, without the payments from FOM made to those who finished in the top 10. At the penultimate round in Brazil, Ericsson and Nasr locked out the back row in qualifying, although both moved up a place when Manor’s Esteban Ocon was caught impeding Jolyon Palmer in Q1.

The race began under the safety car and, a few laps after the ‘restart’, Ericsson crashed on the 13th tour to bring out a safety car. As a host of other drivers had switched to intermediates, Nasr had stayed out on wets and thus had cycled out in ninth – which then became eighth, then seventh… then, for a time, sixth amid two red flags.

When the race finally resumed, Nasr could do little about some of the faster cars; Hulkenberg, Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo all found their way past to put the home favourite back into ninth – with Ocon just behind and seeking to challenge the Brazilian for ninth. But, when Fernando Alonso put a move on Ocon to relegate the rookie Frenchman from the points, Nasr held on to clinch two vital points for Sauber.

For his F1 career, this was to Nasr’s detriment. He’d been in talks with Manor for a drive in 2017, as Wehrlein was set to go the other way, but the loss of ‘Column 2’ prize money effectively killed off the British team – as energy magnate Stephen Fitzpatrick (who bought the team on the eve of the 2015 season) failed to find a buyer.

2018 Azerbaijan GP – Leclerc’s first F1 points

Since that bacon-saving 2016 Brazil race, Sauber had undergone a vast period of change under new ownership. First was the arrival of a new team principal in Frederic Vasseur, who had departed Renault at the end of 2016 amid a conflict with managing director Cyril Abiteboul. Vasseur cancelled a Honda deal set up by predecessor Monisha Kaltenborn, and instead did a deal for contemporary Ferrari powertrains – rather than the one-year-old units it used in 2017.

This paved the way to a title sponsorship deal with Alfa Romeo, which later became a naming deal from 2019-2023. With the renewed Ferrari links, Wehrlein was out – and the reigning Formula 2 champion Charles Leclerc was signed for 2018. The baby-faced Monegasque found it tough going in his opening three races and was outqualified by Ericsson in the first two, before putting the C37 car half a second ahead in China. Then, in Baku, Leclerc broke into Q2 for the first time.

In F2, Leclerc proved to be a Baku specialist – he recovered from the death of his father by chalking up pole, a feature win, and a sprint second en route to his title in the junior category.

Amid a messy start to the race, precipitated by Raikkonen’s clash with Ocon and Sergey Sirotkin being pincered by Alonso and Hulkenberg, Leclerc was up to the points by the time the safety car had come and gone. And the rookie more than held his own with moves on Pierre Gasly and Lance Stroll to bring himself further up the order, before cycling back into 10th after the mid-race stops.

When Ricciardo and Verstappen collided, this became eighth, then seventh when Romain Grosjean lost the car and hit the wall after a phantom touch from Ericsson (who was nowhere near the Frenchman at the time). When Valtteri Bottas suffered a puncture while leading, Leclerc moved up to sixth – kickstarting his year, which ended in impressive form as Sauber improved over the final part of the season and laid the groundwork to his Ferrari move.