A year ago Sauber was on the ropes. The Swiss team was struggling for money and in serious danger of not being able to continue. The team’s CEO (and then shareholder) Monisha Kaltenborn kept her head. A seasoned F1 veteran, having worked with Sauber since 2000 and having been team principal since 2010, she negotiated a deal for the team to be taken over by a Swiss asset management company called Longbow Finance SA.

Swiss financial companies are never very keen to discuss their financing, but it was clear that the first contact between Longbow and Sauber came via driver Marcus Ericsson, who had moved to the team with backing from Longbow. The Sauber investment that followed was separate to the Ericsson deal, although there were plenty of rumours suggesting that the money behind Longbow came from Sweden rather than Switzerland.

As part of the deal Peter Sauber stepped away from his team but Kaltenborn stayed on as CEO and team principal, under a board chaired by a Swiss financier called Pascal Picci, who has headed Longbow Finance since 2000. He arrived in the team having attended just one Grand Prix in his life and it seemed logical to leave the running of the team to people who knew what they were doing, although it must be said that the history of sport is littered with new team owners who arrive thinking they know all the answers and duly turn their teams into expensive failures. Picci seemed to be smarter than that and said that the long-term idea was to use the F1 team as a way to publicise Sauber’s expertise in aerodynamics, 3D prototyping and new materials to generate other business in other sectors, in much the same way as McLaren and Williams have been doing. This all seemed very sensible.

However, the key to any success in F1 remains performance and Sauber has a problem this year in that the car was conceived at a time when the team had no money and the decision was taken to use old Ferrari engines, to keep down costs and to ensure reliability. It was also taken because Sauber was already discussing doing a deal with Honda for 2018 and there was little point in spending money for what was inevitably going to be an interim season.

Last autumn the team hired a number of well-respected engineers, which was no mean achievement given that Sauber’s biggest problem has always been that it is located in the wrong place. Luring the best engineers to Switzerland has never been easy because a lot of F1’s best talents live happily in the Motorsport Valley in the UK and don’t want to uproot their families and move to the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Ferrari has struggled with the same problem in the past and has twice set up and then closed down technical offices in the UK. In any case, Ferrari is a little bit special given its legendary status. Most engineers want to work at Ferrari at some point. Scuderia Toro Rosso has had the same problem and so in the end it set up a technical centre at Bicester in the UK, where most of the development work is now being done.

Sauber has never done that and finding good technical people has been tough, even in the days when BMW was bankrolling the team. There have been a string of technical leaders since Willy Rampf left the team in early 2010, realising that things were going to be tough without BMW support. Initially James Key joined the team in April 2010 but he left in February 2012. There was no technical director until July 2015 when Mark Smith joined, although he left before the start of the 2016 season. The role was given this year to Germany’s Jorg Zander, a bit of a mystery man to many in F1 because of a career that involved a series of short stays at BAR, Williams, Sauber and then Honda (the old BAR revamped). After this became Brawn in 2009 Zander dropped out of the sport until 2015 when he joined Audi as its head of technology in sports car racing. That too was a short-lived move as Audi stopped its programme at the end of last year and Sauber grabbed him to lead the technical team. This year he has been quoted as saying that the team should be able to move up into the midfield, but this has not happened and updates have been late arriving. The race team did manage to score points in Spain, thanks to a clever strategy, but the upgrades which appeared in Monaco were a backward step and the cars were not fast enough to pull off another strategic coup. There is no question that the team’s problems are more than just horsepower and that there are handling deficiencies as well. With Honda coming to Hinwil, there is clearly a need for a better car and only time will tell if the team can deliver that.

Longbow has remained low profile thus far, as one would expect, but it is logical that the owners will want more performance, having invested their money in the team. Sauber is talking to other engineers to strengthen the challenge. The key is stability and selling newcomers on the idea that the team can move up the F1 ladder, Kaltenborn has done a decent job doing that, but it is not easy…

One might speculate that the recent rumours about a new team being put together in the UK could be related to Sauber’s new owners thinking that a UK technical department might be a good idea – but that is pure speculation on my part.