2014 will be a tough blow to recover from for Sauber. What once was a popular team in 2012 with the driver pairing of Kobayashi and Perez has turned into the anonymous figure we saw this season. Experienced driver Adrian Sutil and team mate Esteban Gutierrez have won zero points in 2014 for the Swiss team – their first pointless season in the sport.
The loss of one of F1’s highly rated drivers, Nico Hulkenberg, was a step back before the season began and the Ferrari 059/3 V6 Turbo power unit did not perform as well as hoped. Looking at the team’s results this year, it is hard to imagine four podium finishes just two years ago
Right from the start, Sauber appeared slow in testing. Testing Jerez and Bahrain couldn’t reveal too much about the true performance respective to the rest of the field but it was reported that the C33 was close to 20kg overweight which would’ve hampered the speed and fuelled the driver weight debate which was a popular criticism of the regulations at the start of the year.
Perhaps Australia was the best chance for struggling teams to collect points as pre-season testing showed that the reliability across the field was very doubtful. Sauber finished 11th and 12th in Melbourne after Ricciardo’s disqualification as cars retired left and right. There were 13 finishers with Chilton the only one behind the two Saubers. Not a promising start.
In the next 5 races, Sauber had 7 retirements: the first opportunity for teams to bring major upgrades is the Spanish GP but 16th and 17th showed that they needed a miracle to finish in the top 10 any time soon. A miracle at Monaco possibly?
Monaco turned out to be the season defining moment for the teams at the back. Gutierrez and Sutil qualified 17th and 18th and retired from accidents in the race. The salt in the wound was being relegated to 10th in the constructor’s championship behind Marussia who scored points despite the car being slower both in qualifying and race trim. Team principle Monisha Kaltenborn admitted it would be difficult to score points afterwards.
The next opportunity to arrive was in Hungary, a rain and safety car affected race shuffled the pack and Sutil ended in P11 – less than a second away from Jenson Button’s McLaren.
The reliability of the Sauber had improved after the summer and the weight of the car had been reduced, but this was not unique and the pace still wasn’t there. During the final seven races Sauber never finished higher than 13th. Their strongest circuit in recent years has been Suzuka, where the C31 and C32 could hold their own through the 130 miles per hour corners in the first sector, the C33 however? No, however Gutierrez finished 13th – his best of the year.
Sauber weren’t just poor this year, they didn’t have a real impact on the racing. The TV cameras were never on them, never were they fighting for anything. In qualifying it was a formality for one or both drivers to be eliminated in Q1. It was impressive when Sutil qualified 9th in Texas, but he retired in the first lap collision with Perez and nothing became of it. Even if the car was competitive, the pit crew are losing a second per stop in comparison to the likes of Lotus and McLaren. The team will be looking to stop falling backwards in 2015.
Adrian Sutil 0 points / 18th in the Driver’s Championship
The 31-year-old completed and possibly last season in F1 with Sauber in 2014. The team have already announced their 2015 driver line-up which consists of Caterham’s Marcus Ericsson and Williams 3rd and GP2 title contender, Felipe Nasr. Sutil never had the car beneath him to be able to shine this season. His first lap collision with Perez in Austin proved to be costly accident as the car was able to qualify 9th with Vettel out of the equation starting from the pit lane. Sutil finished 11th twice – better than Gutierrez’s best finish (12th) but Adrian hasn’t consistently outperformed him at all, they are level pegging in both qualifying and race trim.
Esteban Gutierrez 0 points / 20th in the Driver’s Championship
2014 could also be Esteban’s last year in F1 after yet another disappointing season. Many hoped that the second season would help him progress as a driver, and to be fair he hasn’t done a lot wrong, he just isn’t very quick in comparison to most F1 drivers. As mentioned earlier, he is out of a drive for the meantime but does have good financial backing so a test drive somewhere looks likely.
2014 Performance Comparison :
| Adrian Sutil | Esteban Gutierrez | |
| Qualified ahead | 9 | 9 |
| Average qualifying gap | -0.223s | +0.223s |
| Finished race ahead | 5 | 5 |
| Laps spent ahead | 390 | 357 |
What to expect in 2015? It will be hard for the Swiss team to improve next year. Their 10th place (or 9th if Marussia are excluded) doesn’t receive a lot of prize money and their driver line up isn’t exactly a proven improvement. There is next to nothing to suggest that Sauber will improve from 9th or 10th in 2015.
