Few developments ignite the passion of Formula 1 fans quite like the announcement of a promising young talent joining the prestigious grid for an upcoming season. This year has been no exception, with the motorsport world buzzing about the confirmed entries of drivers like Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Oliver Bearman, and Jack Doohan, each bringing their own brand of excitement and potential.
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The latest team to extend an opportunity to a rookie for the 2025 season is Sauber, who recently unveiled McLaren development driver and current Formula 2 championship leader Gabriel Bortoleto as their second seat holder. While this news is thrilling for fans of emerging talent, it carries significant implications for the team’s current lineup. Bortoleto’s highly anticipated arrival means that both of Sauber’s experienced drivers – Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu – will find themselves off the grid next season, sparking a wave of discussion across the F1 community.
Valtteri Bottas: A Veteran at a Crossroads
While Zhou Guanyu’s departure after three seasons in the sport may not have generated widespread outrage among F1’s core fanbase, many of whom feel China’s inaugural Formula 1 driver has reached the natural culmination of his tenure, the impending exit of Valtteri Bottas has struck a different chord. Numerous enthusiasts, particularly RaceFans readers, have expressed deep sympathy for Bottas, whose illustrious career appears to be reaching an unforeseen impasse at the close of his thirteenth world championship season.
Following a challenging performance in last weekend’s wet and wild Brazilian Grand Prix, where Sauber struggled to find any traction within the top ten, it’s increasingly difficult to envision the team securing any points before the season’s conclusion, barring an exceptionally chaotic race. This grim outlook makes it almost inevitable that Bottas will finish the season as the 23rd-placed driver in the championship standings, a stark contrast to his past achievements.
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This season is poised to become Bottas’s most challenging throughout his entire grand prix career. Its lack of success even surpasses his debut campaign in 2013 with an uncompetitive Williams, where a solitary eighth-place finish in the penultimate round in the United States narrowly spared him from going scoreless. With a best finish of 13th across the first 21 rounds of the current season – a record even Logan Sargeant can surpass despite having not raced since August – only an improbable points finish can prevent Bottas from the ignominy of being the last-placed driver in the championship standings. Such a result would be a bitter pill for a driver of his caliber and experience.
The C44 Conundrum: Unpacking Sauber’s Struggles
At first glance, merely scrutinizing the results might lead one to conclude that Bottas’s performance has been, at best, mediocre, seemingly unable to elevate his car beyond its inherent limitations. However, such an assessment would be profoundly unfair to the fourth-most experienced driver on the current grid, trailing only legends like Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton, and Sergio Perez. To truly understand Bottas’s season, one must delve into the pervasive challenges posed by the 2024 Sauber C44.
The C44 has proven to be an exceptionally uncompetitive machine relative to its rivals across the field. Over the 21 Q1 sessions held this year, the C44 has averaged a time 1.16% slower than the fastest car. While this margin might not seem historically poor when compared to certain F1 cars of yesteryear, it comfortably positions the C44 as the slowest of the ten cars currently on the grid. This significant performance deficit is a fundamental factor influencing both Bottas’s and Zhou’s results.
Adding to their woes, Sauber’s performance has noticeably declined as the season has progressed. Early in the year, there were glimmers of hope. Zhou Guanyu came closest to securing the team’s elusive first point of the championship in the season-opener in Bahrain, finishing a commendable 11th. This result ensures he will likely finish ahead of Bottas in the championship standings, primarily due to that early promise.
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Bottas himself had what was arguably Sauber’s best opportunity to score points all season in the fourth round in China. After a stellar qualifying performance saw him secure tenth place – the team’s sole Q3 appearance of the season – Bottas found himself in a genuine battle for the final championship point against Nico Hulkenberg. Tragically, just 19 laps into the race, a drivetrain failure prematurely ended his charge. This golden opportunity for his best result of the season evaporated through no fault of his own, a cruel twist of fate for the experienced Finn.
Bottas vs. Zhou: A Teammate Comparison
In a car that consistently occupies the rear of the field, Zhou Guanyu serves as the only truly reliable barometer against which Bottas’s performance can be measured. While the results from their first two seasons together predominantly favored Bottas, the 2024 campaign has seen the more experienced Finn emphatically outperform his teammate. Bottas has been out-qualified by Zhou on Saturdays only once throughout the entire season, which occurred during the challenging wet qualifying session at Silverstone. On Sundays, Bottas has further demonstrated his dominance, finishing ahead of his teammate 13 times in races where both drivers were classified.
Despite piloting the slowest car on the grid, Bottas has only been the last classified runner on a solitary occasion all season. This statistic alone highlights his remarkable ability to extract maximum performance from limited machinery. Moreover, while almost invariably finishing ahead of his teammate, Bottas has also regularly beaten Logan Sargeant’s Williams to the checkered flag. More impressively, he has finished ahead of both Aston Martin drivers four times each and, in an astonishing testament to his skill, has even outraced Sergio Perez three times in 2024. These instances underscore his tenacious racecraft and ability to capitalize on any advantage, however small, when racing against significantly faster competitors.
The Starting Grid: A Persistent Weakness
If there is one area where Bottas has faced significant criticism in 2024, it is his starts. Despite frequently qualifying ahead of cars that possess superior outright pace, Bottas has consistently struggled to defend and maintain those hard-won positions during the crucial opening laps of grands prix. He has lost at least one place on the first lap in 11 rounds so far, accumulating a net position change of -3 across all rounds held this season. Given that his average grid position is around 15th, placing him amidst a dense pack with many more cars ahead than behind, this struggle at the start reflects negatively on his racecraft in the initial phases of competition. In Formula 1, especially for a team like Sauber operating at the back, losing track position early can be catastrophic, making it incredibly difficult to recover.
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Bottas’s Perspective: Driving Better Than Ever?
Even as he stares down the barrel of his first points-less season in Formula 1, Bottas has previously articulated his belief that he is, in fact, driving better this year than he was during his later seasons with Mercedes, a period when he was regularly winning races and contending for podiums. This claim might seem paradoxical to an outside observer, but Bottas offers valuable insight into the nuances of performance assessment in F1.
“If you look at this season and the last season, when you’re fighting towards the back, obviously it’s much less visible what you can do and what kind of performances you are having,” he explained. “It’s pretty much against your team-mate that you can have a comparison. So for sure, you’re more out there if you’re fighting within the points and towards the front end. That’s just how it goes.”
He continued, emphasizing the internal perspective: “But there are still people in the paddock who know what the real performance is, and especially within the team. They know how I’m performing weekend to weekend and that’s the main thing.” This perspective highlights the often-unseen efforts and subtle gains made by drivers in less competitive machinery, which may not translate into headline-grabbing results but are recognized by those with a deeper understanding of the sport.
What Lies Ahead: A Future Beyond F1?
Unfortunately for Bottas, even these commendable performances, and the understanding within his team, appear to have been insufficient to convince Sauber’s management to retain him alongside Nico Hulkenberg for the upcoming season. As he will not be racing a Formula 1 car in 2025, it seems increasingly likely that his time in the pinnacle of motorsport, at least as a full-time competitor, may have come to an end. This prospect opens up a myriad of questions regarding the future of a driver who has achieved ten Grand Prix victories and countless podiums.
While the immediate outlook for Bottas in F1 is bleak, it would be premature to hastily assume this is the last we have seen of the ten-time Grand Prix winner. The history of Formula 1 is replete with stories of drivers whose careers seemed to have concluded, only for them to find a path back to the grid. Indeed, before they engineered their returns, the F1 careers of drivers like Nico Hulkenberg, Kevin Magnussen, and Daniel Ricciardo all appeared to have reached their definitive end. These examples serve as a potent reminder that in the ever-evolving world of Formula 1, opportunities can resurface when least expected, offering a glimmer of hope for Bottas’s potential return in a different capacity or at a later stage.
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