How BMW-Sauber blew its chance of title glory

After 50 years in motorsport there are plenty of trophies in the display cabinets of Sauber's factory in Hinwil - but not one denoting the greatest prize of all, the Formula 1 world championship. It's a title the team permitted to slip through its corporate fingers over the course of a febrile few months in 2008. That was the view publically expressed by lead driver Robert Kubica at the time, and he's not altered that view over the following 12 years.

When BMW returned to F1 as an engine supplier in 2000 after 13 years in abeyance it did so with energy and purpose - and a plan, even if those goals had to be subtly revised over the course of the coming seasons. Led by ex-F1 driver Gerhard Berger and Dr Mario Theissen, an ambitious but engineering-led corporate climber who was passionate about motor racing, BMW knew exactly what it wanted out of F1: explicit technological links between everyday product and racing, to which end it was developing a V10 for its high-performance road cars.

Berger and Theissen became co-directors of BMW Motorsport in October 1998 with a mandate to take the company back to F1, and Berger moved quickly to kill off other projects he viewed as a waste of time and resource. This author recalls seeing him in the BMW hospitality suite overlooking the pits at Le Mans on the test day ahead of the 1999 24 Hours; the undisguised expression of disdainful hauteur on his face as he gazed out of the window left one in no doubt as to what he thought of the entire scene.

BMW's very first F1 V10 was in the ballpark power-wise, if conservatively over-engineered and therefore overweight. In partnership with Williams it placed third in the constructors' championship in 2000 and quickly rose to become a key challenger - alongside McLaren-Mercedes - to the dominant Ferrari.

But although BMW reached the cutting edge very quickly - its 2002 engine was the first to pass the 19,000rpm barrier - its relationship with Williams soured in parallel with the on-track rancour between drivers Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya.

BMW felt the cars weren't quite up to scratch, even in 2003, when Montoya finished third in the drivers' standings and just 11 points behind champion Michael Schumacher. For its part, Williams would harrumph and point to the engines' occasional capacity to expire dramatically.

At the end of that season Berger's contract wasn't renewed and Theissen took sole charge of BMW Motorsport. He - and the company - now felt that the only way forward was to retool the Williams culture, still rooted in the unstructured and improvisational past, into something more organised and BMW-like. Williams, though, is a team solidly cast in the image of its founders (as Lawrence Stroll was to discover a decade and a half later). It resisted pressure to change its ways and outright rejected any proposal for sale.

The FW26 of 2004 was a dog, with or without its ghastly 'Walrus-tusk' nose, and Theissen duly drew plans for BMW to take its leave - and turn its attention instead to Switzerland, where Peter Sauber had intimated he was ready to cash out of the team he founded. It was a small outfit compared with others, numbering fewer than 300 staff at a time when leading outfits indulged in such luxuries as separate 80-person test teams, but it now had a state-of-the-art windtunnel, courtesy of the lucrative sale of Kimi Raikkonen to McLaren-Mercedes in 2002.

Unlike Renault's recent attempt to follow a similar four-year plan, BMW's strategy almost came to fruition. You could even argue that it failed because Theissen stuck too rigidly to it

From 2006 onwards the team became BMW-Sauber and Munich channeled enormous resources into expanding the Hinwil facility, including a new supercomputer to run a Computational Fluid Dynamics programme in parallel with the new windtunnel. But Theissen was smart: he was well aware it was likely to take several seasons for the investment to bear competitive fruit, for the new corporate structure to settle, and for the new staff to gel with those who'd had their feet under the desk for many years.

Accordingly, then, Theissen drew his roadmap modestly and resolved to stick to the route: points during 2006, when the team would be campaigning a warmed-over evolution of the previous car with a new paint job, podiums in '07 with the first BMW-influenced design, a win on the team's own merit in '08, and a serious championship assault in '09. Unlike Renault's recent attempt to follow a similar plan, this strategy almost came to fruition. You could even argue that it failed because Theissen stuck too rigidly to it.

But even as BMW doubled down on its F1 involvement, the rules were turning in a direction the board didn't like. BMW was one of the most vocal opponents of the shift from V10s to homologated V8s on the grounds that the new formula was too tightly boxed, giving little room for distinctiveness and innovation. It resisted too the subsequent imposition of a common ECU to eliminate tools such as traction control and launch control. These were features it wanted to showcase on its road cars.

So the corporate wind was turning against Theissen and his staff even as they began to deliver the goods on track.

Nick Heidfeld scored the first podium in a topsy-turvy 2006 Hungarian GP, then rookie Kubica - slotted in when Theissen ruthlessly dropped Jacques Villeneuve mid-season - added another two races later at Monza. Most notably they achieved these at a point in the year when scarce resources would normally dictate Sauber dropping off the pace as other teams out-developed it.

The new CFD resources enabled BMW-Sauber to adapt better than several other teams, notably Renault, to the end of the tyre war and Bridgestone's new position as sole supplier. The round-shouldered Bridgestones had greatly different deformation characteristics to the square-profiled Michelins, with significant aerodynamic consequences, and they required different suspension geometry too. By the end of 2007, BMW had arguably the third fastest car in F1.

This was the year of 'Spy-gate'. BMW inherited second place in the constructors' championship and then, in the early races of 2008, reaped the benefits of McLaren being in a state of disarray and Ferrari fielding a fast but occasionally fragile car. Kubica led the Monaco Grand Prix and then won in Canada, where he moved into the lead of the world championship.

Having ticked this box, BMW stuck to its plan and immediately diverted resources to next year's project, which would be a very different car given the new technical rules due to come in to force - including the arrival of Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems, a technology which had enormous cross-over potential for road cars. Get this right and the doubting voices on the board could be silenced.

What Kubica saw was an opportunity going begging. He agitated - quietly at first, then publically - for more development resources to be lavished upon the 2008 car. But there would be no diversion from the plan.

"I would say I have exactly the same view as I did 12 years ago," says Kubica today. "I was in the situation where unfortunately I was feeling that this might be our only chance to fight [for the championship].

"We didn't have the fastest car, this is a fact. Normally the fastest car is winning the championship, but not always, and for whatever reason - the mistakes of others, doing a better job at the beginning of the season - in the end, without the fastest car, we were still leading the championship.

"In the first test, in Valencia, the car was nowhere. We were not told, but I think we were missing some important parts.

"In the Barcelona test we were more competitive but I still didn't have high hopes for the first race, in Australia. I certainly didn't expect to be on the front row.

"This was the first year with the single ECU, with no traction control, and this had a big influence on the driving, but also some car characteristics. You couldn't have an engine with peaky power any more. So it made things very different at the beginning of the season.

"And I thought, 'You have to use your opportunities, because you never know in life when you'll get a second chance'. It's funny - I met some of the mechanics after 10 years, some of the people who were there with me, and even lately people have reminded me about it - and they had exactly the same view. And they regret it, because in the end we didn't get another chance."

"I'm sure that if we were racing the parts we'd tested three months earlier, I'd have won that race easily" Robert Kubica

Beat Zehnder, then and now the team manager, says: "There are different points of view. Mario Theissen would say that we did everything for the 2008 car and then concentrated on 2009.

"I believe we started with the 2009 project too early. We could have concentrated more on 2008. There I fully agree with Robert. He was fighting for the championship, or had a chance to be champion until I think three races to the end."

What continues to rankle with those close to the project is that the 2008 season could have turned out differently but for that crucial decision to change focus. Although perhaps there were wheels turning behind the scenes that weren't outwardly apparent at the time.

"What was more upsetting was that we did test some parts on the 2008 car, which were giving a lot of performance, but we kept them for 2009," says Kubica. "They were really improving the laptimes and characteristics of the car when we ran them in the middle of '08.

"In the end you never know if we would have won or not, but I think we could have done a bit more to try, to achieve something more. But the approach at the time was very based on targets. I remember that year we had the target to win a race. Mario Theissen said our target was to win a race with our own force - not with luck but with our own force.

"And then someone asked if we were targeting to fight for the championship and he said no, we're targeting a single race win. And we achieved that target in Canada. What was missing was another target. 2009 was a target but there was still another five or six months of championship going on.

"I remember in Fuji qualifying P6, with Nick in P16. We were nowhere with performance. But I led the race on lap one and finished second. I'm sure that if we were racing the parts we'd tested three months earlier, I'd have won that race easily.

"For BMW, 2009 was a very important year. And probably we didn't know the reason it was so important.

"If we had been competitive in 2009 BMW might, I think, have found it more difficult to stop. The 2009 car was a big disappointment for us, but they were very keen on the KERS technology. We were probably the first team to test the KERS car.

"There was a completely different aero package so it was a completely new Formula 1. So we started very early and maybe this was the right choice, because I assume someone knew there was a risk that if we weren't competitive, BMW might stop. For me and the others it was completely unknown."

By September 2008 events in the wider world were beginning to catch up with F1. For many years, unscrupulous financial institutions had been selling credit products - mortgages for the most part - to people who stood little realistic chance of repaying, then disguising these toxic time bombs in more obscure, complicated debt packages which were then traded and passed around like trays of cakes. Like a pyramid scheme, it worked so long as fresh imaginary money was rolling in - and consumers across the globe, high on the seemingly ever-increasing value of their houses, were spending well beyond their means.

But when property values declined through 2006 and into 2007, debtors began to default en masse, and the tawdry vista of grift and legerdemain was exposed. Bad debts had contaminated the balance sheets of the entire industry. Trust between institutions broke down and they became discinclined to lend to one another, let alone to customers; credit dried up and banks began to fail. The collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 tipped several other big names over the edge and sent stock markets into freefall.

The effect on F1 of the abrupt economic recession that ensued was immediate. Sponsors questioned their ongoing involvement, as did the car makers who were now uneasily regarding vast swathes of real estate filled with unsold product.

Honda announced its withdrawal in December while Toyota clung on another year, but BMW ostensibly remained committed - until it too dropped a bombshell, curiously timed in the middle of F1's summer break.

"When I saw what the other cars looked like at the start of the [2009] season I began to question if we had a different regulation..." Robert Kubica

"I remember racing in Hungary [2009]," says Kubica. "Then we said, 'OK, see you after the summer break,' then two or three days later I got a phone call to say tomorrow BMW will announce its retirement from F1. It was a shock for everyone. I had a contract for at least one more year there, I think."

Unfortunately, despite the early start, BMW had got its approach to the 2009 package completely wrong - not only missing tricks such as the outwash front wing and double diffuser, but also botching the implementation of the all-important KERS itself. The unit was so heavy that Kubica had to run without it at the beginning of the season, until the need to uphold the corporate image outweighed the desire to be competitive.

"BMW wanted to be the top of the KERS," says Zehnder. "In fact, it was probably the worst system in F1, because it was the only one that was air-cooled. Everyone else had a fluid-cooled system."

Kubica agrees: "I think we were too focused on the KERS. I remember seeing the car for the first time. All the cars looked quite basic, especially the front wings, but ours looked more basic than others.

"I looked at the front wing and said, 'Is this all we can get out of it?' And they said, 'This is the regulation'. When I saw what the other cars looked like at the start of the season I began to question if we had a different regulation..."

Ultimately there was more laptime to be unlocked from clever aero solutions than KERS development. As it became apparent the rules were poorly drawn - power output was capped below a point that made KERS worth the additional weight of carrying such systems - most teams began to run without.

The same rigid inflexibility that had moved BMW to reject a prime chance of winning the world championship had now made its departure from F1 inevitable, and put Sauber in the mire...