Why a Mercedes U-turn couldn't deny Sauber's F1 debut surprise

Thirty years ago today, the Sauber team made its grand prix debut in South Africa and announced its arrival with a stunning fifth place for JJ Lehto. No new team had made the top six on its debut since Wolf won in Argentina in 1977. The Formula 1 world was surprised by the form of the newcomer, whose sleek black car carried only a few logos, including one that proclaimed ‘Concept by Mercedes-Benz’.

The fact that the Swiss squad’s first F1 car was designated C12 was a good clue as to why it had come out of the blocks so strongly. Peter Sauber had been manufacturing racing cars for over two decades, and had won the world sportscar championship with works Mercedes support in 1989 and 1990.

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With a well-equipped factory in Hinwil and a ready-made race team that was capable of running three cars at Le Mans, the move to F1 for 1993 wasn’t really such a stretch. A few years later Sauber would become the works BMW team, and in 2026 it will morph into Audi. But it should have started as the first full Mercedes F1 entry since 1955, as that curious ‘concept by’ hinted.

At the end of 1989 Mercedes had made its longer-term intentions clear by naming F3 stars Michael Schumacher, Karl Wendlinger and Heinz-Harald Frentzen as its sportscar junior team, with a view to training them up for F1. Harvey Postlethwaite was hired to spearhead the project as technical director, and later he recruited his former Tyrrell colleague Mike Gascoyne as head of aero.

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“I went over to Switzerland and agreed terms,” Gascoyne recalls. “This was summer 1991, and I remember going to the Magny-Cours Group C race, when they had the flat-12, a horrendous engine! It took eight hours to change.

“There was a massive fight. The Mercedes guys wanted to use that engine in F1 and Harvey didn’t want to. It was never going to work; it was so wide and flat you could never fit it in an F1 car with a normal Coke-bottle shape. It was a terrible thing. It was Harvey who pushed them to go with Ilmor, who were supplying Tyrrell at the time.

Sauber had run cars successfully in Group C sportscars with Schumacher - but he never raced one of its F1 cars after Mercedes elected not to continue its support

Photo by: Sutton Images

“My job was to basically set up their aero department. They tested in a wind tunnel at Emmen, a Swiss aircraft factory. The model was just made of foam and filler, it was incredibly rough, although they were winning in sportscars at the time.

“I had the opportunity to start a whole department from scratch. We had to update the tunnel, and going to carbon- fibre models was a huge step up for them. I remember we did a mock-up for the chassis of the C12, and Schumacher had a seat fitting in it. But it wasn’t going to be a works Mercedes – if it had been, he would have been in it. By the end of 1991 it was clear something was up. And that’s when Harvey suddenly announced he was going to Ferrari.”

Mercedes dropped a bombshell by announcing that it would not enter F1 as a works team after all. A shell-shocked Peter Sauber was so far down the road with his F1 project that he didn’t want to give up. He squeezed a “silver handshake” out of Mercedes in the form of finance that would allow him to continue independently and enter F1 in 1993.

"We were able to do a huge amount of wind-tunnel testing for that time, and everything from scratch. Actually it was a very nice-looking car, one of the nicest I’ve ever designed" Mike Gascoyne

“It was already in 1991 that Peter decided to go into F1 alone, without Mercedes,” says Beat Zehnder, chief mechanic in the sportscar days and still with the team as sporting director. “Actually it wasn’t without Mercedes, because without them, we couldn’t have done it. We had an offer for being a car tuner for Mercedes, like AMG, road car tuning.

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“After Mercedes withdrew from sportscars the support was mainly on the financial side, and not on the technical side anymore. When it was clear that Mercedes was not fully behind the project, Harvey left.”

Postlethwaite was soon replaced by McLaren and Ferrari veteran Steve Nichols, who worked through 1992 alongside Gascoyne and chief designer Leo Ress. Zehnder stresses that the team was well-prepared for the move to F1.

“We didn’t have any knowledge about an open-wheeler,” he says. “On the other hand, the organisation in Group C was already at a very high level. We had sequential shifting, we had quite big budgets, and we’d done carbon-fibre chassis.

“We did the whole car on our own – except obviously the engine, which came from Mercedes, and the gearbox. But everything else we did, so there wasn’t a lot of change needed from Group C into F1. And 1992 was a year of preparation, which was very good, because we had time.”

Zehnder was pleased with the design of the car, which was optimised during a 1992 spent testing

Photo by: Ercole Colombo

“We had a huge amount of wind-tunnel time to develop the car,” adds Gascoyne. “We had months and months in the tunnel because we weren’t racing, and we came up with the C12.

“Aerodynamically I had learned quite a bit at McLaren, and the few months at Tyrrell had taught me even more. We were able to do a huge amount of wind-tunnel testing for that time, and everything from scratch. Actually it was a very nice-looking car, one of the nicest I’ve ever designed, and also it was pretty quick – because we’d done all that aero work.”

Meanwhile technical director Nichols struggled to adapt to Switzerland and the way the team operated. He would leave before the new season got under way.

“Mr Sauber was strange,” says the American. “I was trying to tell him you need to do this, this and this, and you want to improve and want to be better. I said we have to change the way we work to be more efficient, just do everything a little bit better. And you need to benefit from my experience. And they said you have to adapt to us, and you have to do it our way.”

But Peter Sauber wasn’t entirely stuck in the past – in a pioneering move he named Carmen Ziegler as team manager at a time when few women had a direct involvement in any F1 garage.

By 1993 Schumacher was long established as Benetton’s new superstar. But Wendlinger returned to the Sauber camp after learning the F1 ropes with March, while JJ Lehto moved across from Scuderia Italia.

“It was a good combination, and at the time for sure right,” says Zehnder. “Except for Monaco, where they crashed into each other! Karl was a no-brainer, because he was already driving for us.

“A year before the obvious choice would have been Frentzen, but he left the organisation to go to F3000, and then Japan. He left because he was promised [by Camel] to be the next F1 driver from Germany, but this didn’t happen.”

Mercedes funding continued for C12 even if its technical collaboration halted

Photo by: Ercole Colombo

The C12 showed promise in testing, although there was a late scare when its gearbox had to be substantially reworked. Then on the car’s debut at Kyalami Sauber stunned the regulars as Lehto qualified sixth and Wendlinger 10th.

“The first car was very good,” says Zehnder. “Obviously it helped that we had a year’s time to prepare ourselves. We had to get adapted to the engine, which was an Ilmor. It was not the best, but it was a very good engine.

“I remember we had some major issues with the carbon oil tank, which delaminated. And we were working day and night in Kyalami to solve the problem. We had to go to a hospital to organise a vacuum pump to fix it!”

In a race of high attrition, Lehto finished fifth in the season opener despite problems of his own.

"Ever since we’ve been the best newcomer. Haas did a good job, but not quite the same" Beat Zehnder

“We could have finished on the podium with JJ, but we had an ECU change that took about one and a half minutes in the pits,” Zehnder recalls. “We had some issue with humidity in the electronics. Without that change it would have been possible to be on the podium.”

There was another wasted opportunity second time out in Brazil, where the black cars shared the fourth row.

“At Interlagos Karl had a very good position in the race, and then we had to stop because there was something wrong with the air filter of the engine – it was eating the air filter,” says Zehnder.

The momentum continued at Donington Park, where Wendlinger and Lehto qualified fifth and seventh. And warm-up for the race looked promising.

Sauber was immediately quick out of the blocks in 1993, and a debut podium for Lehto might have been possible without an ECU change

Photo by: Sutton Images

“JJ was second fastest in the warm-up, he did one flying lap, got out of it and said, ‘The car is quick, I’m going to win this race,’” says Gascoyne. “Then his ignition switch failed on the grid and he had to get in the spare, which was set up for Wendlinger.”

“Back then we had a T-car: one weekend it was for JJ, and one weekend it was for Karl,” says Zehnder. “At Donington it was set up for Karl. JJ had a problem with the electronics on the grid, so he jumped into Karl’s T-car, and the driver installation wasn’t right for him, because Karl was very tall.

“JJ almost couldn’t reach the pedals. I think he came in after a few laps saying it was impossible for him to drive. And Karl had a massive first lap. He followed Ayrton Senna, who was out of position, and even now this opening lap of Ayrton is one of the best I’ve ever seen. And Karl followed him until he was crashed out by Michael Andretti…”

“The race that we thought we were going to win, we were soon going home!” adds Gascoyne, who also points out that things with the drivers did not remain entirely harmonious. “Later JJ got very frustrated because Wendlinger was the favoured son, and then he decided he was going to Benetton to drive with Michael. He was distracted and fell out of favour.”

That run of early races was to be a high, at least in terms of grid positions. As the season progressed the team slipped back as others developed their cars more, much to Gascoyne’s disappointment. Rivals with active suspension – which Sauber did not have – remained out of reach.

Lehto earned a high of a fourth place at Imola, a result matched by Wendlinger at Monza. The Austrian also logged a few fifth and sixth places, and come the end of the season Sauber sat in seventh in the constructors’ championship, equal on points with sixth-placed Lotus. It didn’t quite match the fifth position earned by Jordan in its rookie year in 1991, but no start-up team – as opposed to a renamed one – has bettered that in the past 30 years.

“Ever since we’ve been the best newcomer,” says Zehnder, who has not missed a race since and now plays a key management role as sporting director. “Haas did a good job, but not quite the same. The main memory is more from the part that I was responsible for, like organisation and logistics. The whole of our race team going to Kyalami was 28, with three cars.

Wendlinger was going well at Donington until an opening lap clash with Andretti put him out

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“Back then a driver turned up with a group of girls; these days a driver has his manager, his mental trainer, his physio and his lawyer! I can’t say it was much more fun, but it was different. The difficulty in 1993 was to develop the car for the following year, and this was also a time when we had a huge amount of in-season tests, so we had to increase the number of people.”

By the end of the year that total didn’t include Gascoyne, who had accepted an offer to rejoin Postlethwaite at Tyrrell.

What would have happened if the original plans had come to fruition, and Schumacher and Wendlinger had raced a Silver Arrows-liveried Mercedes C12 in 1993, with full technical support and proper financial backing?

“On 2 October, I went and handed in my notice in Hinwil,” he recalls. “Mr Sauber wasn’t there, but the financial director was. He said, ‘Oh well it was the first of the month yesterday, you may as well leave then, and we don’t have to worry about paying you!’ So I officially left the day before I handed my notice in, and I went and got on a flight to England and went into work at Tyrrell.”

One tantalising question remains – what would have happened if the original plans had come to fruition, and Schumacher and Wendlinger had raced a Silver Arrows-liveried Mercedes C12 in 1993, with full technical support and proper financial backing?

In fact, encouraged by Sauber’s debut season, Mercedes and Ilmor strengthened their ties in 1994. The following year, the Stuttgart marque threw its weight behind McLaren – and Sauber went its own way with Ford power from 1995. Schumacher and Mercedes would finally be reunited… in 2010.

Sauber was overhauled in the development race as the season went on, but it's sixth place in the constructors standings is unrivalled since by a startup team

Photo by: Sutton Images