A REAL MESS AT SAUBER

The history of Formula 1 is dotted with people who bought teams and thought that they knew how to run them better than those with years of experience. The result is generally the same with the new owners eventually realizing that it might be a little more difficult than they imagined, but usually a large amount of money is lost before lessons are learned. It seems that this is now happening at Sauber. The team was acquired 11 months ago by a Swiss-registered company called Longbow Finance SA. The boss of this was an asset manager called Pascal Picci, who became the chairman of the team. Those without F1 experience often underestimate the job, or listen to bad advice. To be fair, it is a jungle in which it is easy to get lost, but it is usually wisest to listen, rather than thinking you know all the answers and telling people how to do things. This seems to be the problem at Sauber with CEO Monisha Kaltenborn and the chairman Pascal Picci being unable to agree on how the team should develop. Picci has been to fewer than 10 Grands Prix and appears to have made the mistake of thinking that he can do a better job than someone who has been with Sauber for 20 years, has been a director since 2001 and the team principal since 2010. The issue between the two parties seems to be over the technical management of the team with Kaltenborn keen to hire new senior technical staff and Picci wanting to stick with Jorg Zander, who was taken on as technical director at the start of the year. He has a patchy record in F1 but joined the team from Audi. He arrived too late to have any influence on the design of the 2017 car, which was designed when the team had little money, and which has not been properly developed this year because updates due in Spain failed to arrive in time and when they did appear in Monaco they seemed to make no difference to the car.

The Sauber is powered by a year-old Ferrari engine but the chassis is clearly not as good as it could be. It seems that Picci felt that Kaltenborn should stay out of technical affairs, while she argued that she is only involved because it was necessary and she has been looking for ways to step back, leaving the technical management in the hands of suitable people. Kaltenborn recently concluded an engine supply deal with Honda.

It is rumoured that Longbow is now looking for a suitable replacement for Kaltenborn but has struggled to find one as F1 people are generally reluctant to move to German-speaking Switzerland. Various approaches have been made and the favourite is Frederic Vasseur, who was briefly running operations at Renault F1. He has yet to make a decision but does not seem to want to be team principal and may end up coming in to run the racing team. Sauber is a difficult team to lead, unless you are one of "the family" but there are no obvious candidates other than Kaltenborn. Trying to run the team like any other F1 operation could create a total disaster because Sauber never been, nor ever will be, a normal team and trying to make into one is a risk.

Source: JSBM