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The only vacant 2025 Formula 1 seat not controlled by Red Bull is the second Sauber seat alongside Audi’s first F1 driver signing Nico Hulkenberg.
Sauber incumbent Valtteri Bottas remains the favourite to secure the drive but is the 10 grand prix winner still the best candidate now that two exciting junior options have emerged?
The Race’s Edd Straw, Scott Mitchell-Malm and Josh Suttill debated who Sauber should pick for its final F1 season before it morphs into the Audi works team.
Take the in-form stand-in?
Franco Colapinto has forced his way into 2025 F1 driver market discussions with his impressive stand-in stint for Williams this year.
But there’s no room at Williams for the foreseeable future with both Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz signed up until the end of 2026 at least.
So should Audi take the opportunity to try and poach Colapinto? Mitchell-Malm thinks so…
“It’s a simple answer based on the evidence of the last few races of this season - Franco Colapinto," he argued.
“He’s done a fantastic job as a slightly surprise mid-season replacement. He had a solid if unspectacular debut but was basically at [Logan] Sargeant’s upper limit straight out of the blocks at Monza. He’s just gone from strength to strength.
“He scored points in Baku where he was right on Alex Albon’s pace. Then in Singapore, he might have even had the edge on Albon, he was certainly very close to him, and was on course to beat him on merit in the grand prix after a stunning first-lap move. Albon retired from that race so we didn’t see exactly how it played out, but Colapinto has basically shown himself to be F1-worthy immediately.”
Edd Straw fears Colapinto would risk being wasted at Sauber and getting lost in an uncompetitive team.
“Colapinto would risk, with not having the experience, just getting carried away by the tide of a team that is drifting too much,” Straw argued.
Josh Suttill thinks Colapinto’s proven he can thrive in a high-pressure environment: “He’s risen to the challenge at Williams, why can’t he do the same at Audi?”
“The team itself has overlooked youth for too long. It had Theo Pourchaire on the sidelines and never gave him a chance.
“Zhou Guanyu was a rookie with Sauber but that was more for commercial reasons. So I think they need to go back to their roots and look at the likes of Kimi Raikkonen [debutant with Sauber in 2001] and Charles Leclerc [debutant with Sauber in 2018], all these great young drivers they’ve given a chance to, there’s one right here ready for the taking.”
Stick with experience?
Straw thinks new Audi F1 team chief Mattia Binotto should stick with the experience that Bottas brings for 2025.
“This is a team that desperately needs to make some progress in the next 12 months and beyond,” Straw said.
“They’ve wasted a lot of their run-in time to become the Audi works team in 2026. They need experienced drivers who can really bring that experience in terms of sharpening up the team.
“Now, you could argue that Bottas has been there for three seasons and hasn’t made much difference, but the team hasn’t really been listening to the drivers as much as it should do.
“He’s got a vast amount of experience, he’s a great team player, still very quick and performing at a high level.
“If they can fully utilise him and engage him in a way that they haven’t done since the early days, before [then team boss] Fred Vasseur left, then they’ve got a great performer who can really help accelerate that progress in terms of sharpening up the team, strengthening the team.
“They’ve wasted too much time and you need experience in this scenario.”
Mitchell-Malm argued Audi’s already getting the experience benefit with the arrival of 37-year-old Hulkenberg next year.
"Colapinto is a move for the future - which is something that Audi and Sauber have not necessarily neglected but screwed up with how inefficient they’ve been as a programme for the last two or three years,” Mitchell-Malm said.
“Colapinto is a good way for them to set themselves up for the future, especially as we’re not entirely sure about what Mattia Binotto thinks of Hulkenberg [given he was an Andreas Seidl signing, not a Binotto signing].
“I would say that if you’ve got that experienced driver there for the short term, maybe medium term, but you supplement that with Colapinto - who gives you an exciting youth prospect and, on the evidence of what we’ve seen so far, isn’t going to be a downgrade on Bottas in terms of pace and performance.”
Straw believes, however, that it’s not just experience that Bottas brings but some much-needed continuity.
“Hulkenberg has F1 experience but Bottas has team experience,” Straw said.
“What’s been talked about is a 1+1 year contract, so definitely Bottas for next year, then Audi consider more for 2026.
“I think they really need to make the most use of it. The debate would be different if it was a different team."
The McLaren wildcard
If Sauber goes for youth, is there an alternative to Colapinto - one with perhaps an even higher ceiling?
Sauber clearly believes there is because it is known to have already held exploratory conversations about McLaren junior Gabriel Bortoleto.
“He’s leading the F2 standings," Suttill pointed out. "Of course, F2 is anything but a level playing field so you can’t read too much into the points standings. But he’s had a really impressive year, he was on pole on debut, something I think only Leclerc has done in two decades of the second tier.
“He’s just had a really impressive season and much like Colapinto has forced his way into this argument. All the reasons for Colapinto only increase the case for Bortoleto because Bortoleto has been even more impressive [in F2].
“He’s also a couple of years younger [Bortoleto is 19, Colapinto is 21] so he might even be the even more exciting one.”
The question is though - would McLaren let him go?
“Bortoleto feels like someone that McLaren wants to hang onto longer-term,” Mitchell-Malm countered.
“There have been some discussions around him and it just feels like McLaren will ask for a bit too much to let Bortoleto go, they don’t really want to let Bortoleto go completely as a full Sauber-Audi driver long-term. They want a little bit of a claim to him if necessary. He has only just joined [after winning F3 title at end of 2023].
“He’s not someone that they’ve sunk years and years of development into, but they have put him in an old F1 car, he’ll get FP1 outings.
“Yes, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are hopefully going to be McLaren’s long-term future but you don’t throw away a driver like Bortoleto if he’s on your books.”
Bortoleto has been backed by Fernando Alonso’s management company for the last two years. “Who is better than getting out of a McLaren contract than Fernando Alonso who has got out of two of them?" asks Suttill.
“Don’t underestimate the influence that Alonso and his management team can have there. They must have known when they signed this deal with McLaren that Norris and Piastri would be the future at McLaren, so I wonder if there’s some kind of clause there or some kind of way of getting out of it to make sure that their driver gets in an F1 seat soon.”
Prices too steep?
So McLaren will want to retain control of Bortoleto - or will require serious compensation. But Colapinto won’t be easy to extract from Williams either - and Sauber might have missed the best window to do so.
“If Sauber had been a little more on the front foot about this - not necessarily before Colapinto was in F1 because he was properly on the periphery there, doing a good job in his rookie F2 season but not stunningly obvious as a candidate... [but] if it had looked at what he did in Monza, for example, and gone actually ‘you know what, this is a really promising young driver’ and then moved in then, it’s a different conversation to what they’re having with Williams now,” Mitchell-Malm argued.
“The price to get him out of that Williams deal is going to be a lot higher, purely because when it’s a seller's market and Williams is doing a good job, it can name its price.
“But also Williams is recognising that Colapinto is a much more serious prospect for its F1 team in the future because of the job he’s doing now. Norris and Piastri might get snapped up - but Albon and Sainz could be proven to be too good for Williams if that revival takes too long to pick up.
“So Williams now might be looking at Colapinto as a driver for 2027, '28. ‘We might really need this driver’.
“I’m not ceding ground to Edd in this grand debate on who it should sign - but I can well imagine that not just for Bortoleto but [also] Colapinto, they might just be more trouble than their worth. Whereas Bottas really is the easiest option.”
