🇧🇪 F1'24: R14 - Low Stakes

George Russell and Mercedes thought that they’d pulled off the near impossible. An Ocean’s Eleven of a win, brilliantly taking a one-stop strategy, making the tyres work across Spa in a way that few other drivers could do. 

Unfortunately, the joy was short-lived after a slam dunk disqualification after his car was underweight by 1.5kg. For Mercedes, it meant that Lewis Hamilton won for the second time this season, his third consecutive podium, with the streak starting with that emotional win at Silverstone.

It also meant that Mercedes seemed to have the best car for a one-stop (albeit underweight) and a two-stop.

It sets up a second half of the season that should have neutrals relishing the sport’s return in Zandvoort towards the end of the month, because alongside Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, there are several drivers jostling for first place, and this jostling, combined with Verstappen’s ability to extract almost everything from his RB20, and my prediction is that there is no Drivers’ Championship controversy, but those moments of individual brilliance will be shared out among the drivers near the front.

But while it’s exciting at the front, the gap between those big four teams and the others is starting to become even greater. Barring any mechanical issues or a crash, eight of the spots feel locked up, we just don’t know the order, which makes those three points at the end, split between ninth and tenth, even more critical for teams with ambitions to finish fifth overall.

One team has all-but abandoned any plans for that and are now scrabbling around for respectability in the basement of the sport. Step forward Stake Sauber Kick not yet Audi.

A driver lineup with a race winner in Valtteri Bottas and a fun but raw driver in Zhou Guanyu, Sauber have a lineup that belies their position of zero points. In fact, if you look at other zero-point scoring teams since the current scoring system in 2010, their lineup is comparable. 

The likes of Heikki Kovalainen, Lucas di Grassi and Timo “is that” Glock all got the big donut in past seasons, and while those drivers aren’t elite elite in F1, by no means are they bad drivers.

But, as we go into F1 post-summer break, as well as that brilliant spotlight on the teams at the front, some scrutiny needs to be reserved for the backmarkers too, and we should wonder whether Sauber will score a first point since Qatar in October 2023.

They’re not immune to improvement either. At the start of the season, Sauber’s pit stops became a thing of calamity as they continually cross-threaded their wheelnuts and cost their drivers valuable seconds. These super-lightweight nuts were getting too hot and it meant that compared to any of the other teams, they could not service the cars in a competitive time.

But they’ve improved as the season has gone on and actually had the 7th fastest stop in Belgium (stat from DHL), and again, per DHL, are higher in the overall points standings for pit stops than Haas and Williams.

It may not seem like much, but it’s no coincidence that the teams at the front also have the most efficient and fastest pit operations.

So if they’ve got that bit sorted, and the prospect of Nico Hulkenberg joining the team, 2025 might look better. But there are still plenty of weekends with racing left in 2024, so how are they going to score points with Bottas and Zhou?

Speaking to F1.com, Bottas talked about the team’s hopes for 2024: “It's been a challenging year for us. We still haven't scored a single point which wasn't the target going into the season. We wanted to see an upwards trajectory from last year, and it hasn't happened.”

That’s one way to put it. The second half of 2023 saw them score just three points finishes, and 16 points overall - enough for them to finish 9th in the Teams’ Championship. Bottas is now the classical 21st driver in a 20-driver series and life in the basement can’t be made any easier when Carlos Sainz is joining Williams next season, Alpine seem to be slowly climbing out of the quicksand they were mired in, stealing the odd point here and there, and Haas have Oliver Bearman coming in a young rookie in 2025.

There’s no real point of difference to Sauber at the moment, and no real identity. Even their actual identity has to be changed ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix and while Sauber try to climb out of the basement via the Zandvoort banking, this weekend or Monza probably won’t see them challenge the top 10, which begs the question, what tracks do actually suit the Sauber C44? Zhou crashed out in 2023 here, and Bottas finished 14th, so there is a lot of room for improvement, but the problem with this particular basement is that as the season goes on and the hunt for that first point continues, it will get ever more difficult to get out of the swamp.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. The summer break is gone and hopefully so is the block I’ve been feeling.