Sauber has confirmed it will drop both Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu from its Formula 1 driver line-up at the end of the season, and announced the final piece of its line-up puzzle.
We already knew one of either Bottas or Zhou would be heading for the exit long ago, after the team (led by Andreas Seidl at the time) officially announced the signing of Haas’ Nico Hulkenberg before the new management came in.
In the F1 paddock it was pretty clear that Zhou would be the driver making way for the confirmed Hulkenberg – but it was the seat on the opposite side of the garage that was up for question until the confirmation that Gabriel Bortoleto would join on a multi-year deal.
This particular seat was publicly grappled over since much earlier on in the year ever since Sauber made its case clear to the departing Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz.
Sainz was who incoming Audi F1 Project had its heart set on to drive for Sauber in 2025 and Audi in 2026. But, it lost out on the highly-rated Spaniard to Williams.
Alternative names quickly came to fore – the likes of Mick Schumacher and latterly Franco Colapinto. Nevertheless, it was long-expected that Bottas would be re-signed to ensure at least a modicum of continuity prevailed during this outfit’s Sauber-Audi transition period.
It’s worth remembering at this point that this team is effectively the acting Audi works team already – with new CEO Mattia Binotto, who was seemingly brought in by the Audi F1 Project after Seidl and Oliver Hoffman’s departures, calling the shots.
Binotto had already agreed terms to some extent with Bottas but then someone, somewhere had a change of heart. Whether it was witnessing the rise of much-loved Franco Colapinto arrive on the scene at Williams that swayed the youth vs experience battle, we’ll probably never know.
Nonetheless, Sauber-Audi has gone for Bortoleto in favour of a multiple race-winner who once raced at a future Audi-rivalling works team for five seasons – someone who knows what it takes to win in F1! It’s a bold move replacing Bottas but it’s one that could pay-off rather nicely in this case.
McLaren junior driver Bortoleto is leading the Formula 2 championship with Invicta Racing and is all set to take the 2024 title. Watching the likes of Felipe Drugovich be overlooked for a full-time F1 seat after a similarly impressive championship-winning F2 campaign certainly would have weighed on Bortoleto’s mind until this week’s announcement was out in the open.
There’s a huge risk for McLaren that it will deeply regret releasing someone with Bortoleto’s obvious talent to make a name for himself as the future face of Audi in F1 – one of the most exciting new projects in motorsport right now and a team that could also become an arch nemesis of the Woking-based outfit in future.
McLaren are of course hamstrung to some extent by the ‘good-problem-to-have’ problem of having two world-class drivers in Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri taking up space for the foreseeable future, but you never know how long either of the pair will remain in your car. What if Piastri got an offer he couldn’t refuse at Red Bull or Ferrari, for example?
20-year-old Bortoleto could easily become a thorn in the side of Hulkenberg at Sauber-Audi if the German driver doesn’t make strides. The Brazilian driver has huge potential and might well have a higher ceiling than Hulkenberg now in his thirteenth F1 season.
One thing is for sure though, Audi have a monumental task lying ahead of them in order to extract the Sauber team from its current nadir. It does have a chance to do just that with the resources it’s preparing to put behind the squad, but these changes need to be applied in the right way.
From Bortoleto’s point of view, he doesn’t have much to lose and has time to learn throughout the next two or three seasons as the team rebuilds.
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