It’s decided: the Sauber team has turned its back on the great Valtteri Bottas to enlist the services of a beginner and future great driver.
Because so far, Gabriel Bortoleto has been more than impressive: a member of the McLaren team’s junior program, he won the Formula 3 championship last year in his first participation. This year, he leads the Formula 2 championship with only two race weekends remaining. Max Verstappen is a fan of this 20-year-old Brazilian whose qualities he only praised last weekend in São Paulo.
After long negotiations with McLaren for the English team to let go of its nugget, Sauber announced the arrival of Gabriel Bortoleto alongside Nico Hülkenberg next season.
For the Brazilian, it is the opportunity to launch into F1 without delay – there will not be a place at McLaren for a long time -, and with, above all, the prospect of taking part in the Audi project. “This project is one of the most exciting in motorsport, if not all sports combined,” confirmed Gabriel Bortoleto on Wednesday. “Joining a team that combines the rich history of Sauber with the Audi name is a true honor. I intend to grow at the same time as this project and reach the summit of motorsport with it.”
Before becoming world champion in his Audi-Sauber, Gabriel Bortoleto will have to help turn around the team. And it is not won: this season, the team has not scored any points and is in last place of the ten manufacturers.
Getting to the top is going to take time. Hired in August, the new boss, Mattia Binotto, ex-Ferrari, does not have German culture and must learn everything about how the Audi brand works. In Hinwil, the idea is to hire 400 new engineers to support the current 560 employees. Integrating this small world promises to be extremely complex.
On the engine side, it’s worse: Audi is concocting its own turbo V6 for 2026, in its Neubourg factory, near the brand’s headquarters in Ingolstadt. It is very difficult to create a new engine in F1, and Audi says it is spending more than a billion euros on the project.
But the development of this engine and the new chassis, as well as the integration of hundreds of new engineers, represents a mammoth project that may take years.
Gabriel Bortoleto is delighted today, but the scale of the task will quickly bring him back to reality. He is right: the Audi project represents one of the most ambitious in F1 history. But it is also one of the most difficult to succeed.
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