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After the initial promise of its Mercedes-powered Formula 1 debut had initially subsided, the Sauber name became intrinsically linked to midfield obscurity.
Often failing to rouse F1's commenters and pundits from their stupor of ennui, Sauber settled into a pattern of delivering strong early results in a season, before then fading out into the midfield as its reliability and pragmatic approach was rarely tempered with a strong development path.
Although heavily backed by Red Bull and Petronas at the time, Sauber found breaking into the points an increasingly difficult prospect as it approached the new millennium. After the year 2000, both Pedro Diniz and Mika Salo decided to leave the team - the former electing to waive his driving career to become a shareholder in Prost, as the latter joined up with Toyota to spend a year trundling around Paul Ricard in the test-hack TF101; presumably, that was a far more tantalising prospect than spending another year at Sauber.
