Formula 1 teams don’t leap from backmarker to frontrunner overnight, an absurd premise that was among the criticisms of the plot of F1: The Movie. Yet its release coincided with Sauber’s real-world transformation from backmarker in the first eight events of 2025 into contender. Nico Hulkenberg’s third place in the British Grand Prix may have been a smaller ‘victory’ than Hollywood demands, and there’s no existential threat to the team to drive the drama, but even without the cinematic largesse it’s a remarkable story.
Any epic requires a backstory and Sauber has that, albeit a convoluted one. Formed in 1970 to build and run hillclimb machinery campaigned by founder Peter Sauber, it made the long journey to F1 in 1993 via success with Mercedes in sportscars. Sauber’s F1 graduation was intended to be as a full works team, only to go it alone when Mercedes backed out. Mercedes ultimately hooked up with McLaren, taking with it the Ilmor/Mercedes engines Sauber ran initially That was the beginning of a recurring narrative thread of thwarted manufacturer dreams.
Sauber built a reputation as a pragmatically-run midfield operation before BMW bought it, as manufacturer opportunity knocked a second time. After running as BMW Sauber from 2006-2009, BMW pulled the plug thanks to a combination of the global financial crisis and the slump in results. Peter Sauber, who retained a stake throughout this period, saved the team but times were tough to the point where Sauber teetered on the edge of financial oblivion before being bought by Swedish billionaire Finn Rausing. After coming close to selling to Michael Andretti in 2021, Audi started its acquisition of the team, then in its fourth of five seasons running under the Alfa Romeo name thanks to a sponsorship deal, in 2022. Next year, the name changes, Audi’s new power unit arrives and the German works team dream will be fulfilled.
That brings huge expectations, something Sauber fell well short of over the previous two years. It never got as bad as it did for fictional team APX GP, which was without a point in two-and-a-half seasons at the start of F1: The Movie, but Sauber wasn’t far off. From mid-2022 to the end of 2024, it scraped together just 24 points in 59 races. This brings us to the real start of the story: Sauber’s terrible start to 2025.
Hopes were higher after an uptick in form late in ‘24, but pre-season testing in Bahrain was a nightmare. The car had to be set up stiff, was tricky to drive, unpredictable and slow. Worst of all, it was not behaving as the simulation tools said it should. There was at least an upgrade introduced for the Australian Grand Prix comprising a new front wing, floor and bodywork, which represented the ‘real’ 2025 Sauber. This improved the car, but only from one that was all at sea and well off the back, to one at the back but capable of scraping into Q2 if qualifying was executed perfectly, even if it lacked race pace. That was the reality for the first eight events of 2025, with Hulkenberg’s seventh place in Australia owing more to good pitstop timing when the rain returned than pace. Hulkenberg referred to “struggling in traffic” and a car that was “challenging to drive”, while Gabriel Bortoleto indicated “even when we have pace it’s just so difficult” and mentioned “unpredictable balance”, to pick just four comments from across that run of events.
This was tackled with an upgrade that really did make the car better for combat, F1: The Movie style. Or rather, it is now better behaved in turbulent air around other cars than it was previously. This is a problem for any F1 car, but the Sauber was particularly weak in this area early in the season. Gabriel Bortoleto’s trip into the gravel on the opening lap of the Chinese Grand Prix after being caught out by the wake of Ollie Bearman’s Haas illustrates how bad things were. This isn’t Hollywood’s idea of a car that magically works brilliantly in dirty air, even though that has improved. Instead, it’s a consequence of the all-round improvement in the aerodynamics as a result of making a car that’s less peaky. This is all about making the aerodynamic performance more robust, meaning less prone to suffering from stalls that result from airflow separation or the network of interacting vortices bursting that leads to a sudden drop in downforce.
“I call it driveability,” says team principal Jonathan Wheatley. “I can remember sitting [on the pitwall] in Jeddah during qualifying and thinking ‘the drivers just cannot pick a right braking point for Turn 1’, the car was so difficult to stop and turn there. I remember coming away from there in our debrief saying that the drivers just can’t build on a consistent lap time because the car is a handful in certain situations.
“What I noticed from the first upgrade was a confidence, even on the onboard cameras – I still like to watch them during the sessions, especially during qualifying. And I think with the development program that’s been put in place [means] there’s just a confidence in the car now. They can enjoy driving, it’s less peaky, they’re able to manage a race pace over a distance because they’re not worried about one axle over another. And there’s a consistency in building our qualifying pace. One of the reasons for being in Q2 [more often] this year is just having a broader operating window.”
Sauber’s upgrades have made the car more driveable, which in turn instills more confidence in the drivers. And while the improved parts won’t carry over to next year, the lessons learned on the technical side will. Zak Mauger/Getty Images
Wheatley is referring to the new floor that appeared for the ninth race of the season in Spain. Originally planned for two races earlier, this was the result of some rigorous investigation back at Sauber’s Hinwil base into why the car hadn’t behaved as expected from the start. This process has not only made the car more competitive, but crucially, has improved the technical team’s depth of understanding and methodologies. This underlying science will be transferable to the 2026 project, even though the parts aren’t.
“Barcelona was a result of a lot of homework on getting a slightly nasty surprise at the beginning of the season of this is not where we should have been,” said Key. “Our [performance] number was pretty high, theoretically, and had we achieved it, we would have been where we are now or better, but we just didn’t, [meaning the initial reaction was] there’s something odd going on here. So we dived very deeply and came up with new ways of developing things, new metrics to judge something by. We did a lot of measurements on track to try and get our heads around why, when you have a number in front of you, actually a whole set of numbers, they’re not repeating themselves on track.”
The Barcelona floor was the key change. Hulkenberg turned the performance gain into a remarkable fifth place in Spain thanks to a combination of Kimi Antonelli’s retirement triggering a safety car, bolting on fresh softs that allowed him to pass quicker cars, and Max Verstappen’s penalty. However, the fact he was on course for ninth place on merit even before that showed how big a step had been made in delivering what Hulkenberg says the feedback had been all season, namely “make it fast, make it driveable, consistent, comfortable”.
Delivering on that is what really made the difference, yielding a bigger performance gain than anticipated for Sauber. The downforce produced by the car with the Spain package was higher, but the improvement in pace was compounded by the drivers being able to attack. Add to that further iterations of the floor introduced in Austria and Britain, making this what the team calls a three-step upgrade, and you can see why Sauber has become so much stronger. Qualifying performances have improved somewhat, but race pace is markedly better particularly on high fuel loads. This has helped the drivers make gains even in races where qualifying hasn’t gone well.
“The upgrades have brought a broad spectrum of performance,” said Wheatley after the Hungarian Grand Prix, where Bortoleto finished sixth on merit. “It does seem like we’re able to follow a little bit closer than some other teams, but the drivers just seem very comfortable with the car on different tire compounds and across different circuits. It’s very encouraging.”
The result of these improvements is a haul of 45 points that puts it seventh in the constructors’ championship and firmly in contention for fifth, given Williams is only nine points ahead. Key to that total are the 15 points Hulkenberg took for third at Silverstone, the team’s first podium finish since Kamui Kobayashi in the 2012 Japanese Grand Prix. As the grizzled veteran, once left on the F1 scrapheap but returning to take a long-awaited ‘victory’ (well, third place), Hulkenberg’s 2025 story has a touch of the Brad Pitt character in F1: The Movie, Sonny Hayes – and it’s certainly a redemption story in that regard. He’s even got the young hotshot teammate too, although Bortoleto’s season has been impressive from the start.
Now comes the real challenge for Sauber, because this is far from the end of the story. Audi’s stated objective of challenging for victories and world championships by the end of the decade is an ambitious one, and recovering from a diabolical start to achieve midfield respectability is a drop in the ocean compared to what needs to be done to achieve that. There’s still a vast amount of recruitment, restructuring and building to do, but what is encouraging is that technically a breakthrough has been made. To introduce one package that improves matters is a positive, but the fact gains have been repeated with further developments is critical. Expectations are therefore higher internally for the rules reset in 2026, which will allow the first genuinely clean-sheet of paper designed under the leadership leadership of Mattia Binotto, who joined last year with the joint titles of chief operating officer and chief technical officer.
This is where the real-world story deviates from the movies. There are no shortcuts in F1 and there’s still a long way to go for this team as it approaches its metamorphosis into Audi, but the improvement in tools, the growth in know-how, is definitive proof that progress is being made even though there was nothing to show for it just a few short months ago. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a start – one that just might, many years down the line, even lead to the perfect Hollywood ending for Sauber.
