Will Sauber's C44 go down as F1's best point-less car, or are there better contenders?

Should 2024's Formula 1 season close out with the current formbook, then Sauber looks set to become the first team to register a scoreless year since Haas hit rock bottom in 2021. The contemporary effects of the cost cap and aerodynamic testing restrictions has brought the field closer together in modern times; even though the top four teams have a gaping chasm between them and the rest of the field, the minor points placings are hotly contested.

And it can't be forgotten that the brace of neon-green and carbon-grey Sauber C44s angled for minor points in the opening races, but pitstop mishaps rather denied Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu the opportunity to sneak a couple of points early doors. Since then, other teams have progressed; Sauber, for whatever reason, has not.

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In reality, it's a case of the Swiss team being caught in the weird hinterland between its past life as Alfa Romeo and its future as Audi. The German car giant is investing in the background ready for its 2026 assault on F1, but sees little worth in looking at the current term as the car does not carry its own name.

In the meantime, the current Sauber ownership structure under Tetra Pak billionaire Finn Rausing (Audi will take 100% shareholding in 2026) only nominally retains control and Audi is responsible for the current decision making.

If 2024 fails to offer one of those madcap affairs that presents a prime opportunity for the lesser teams to gather an uncharacteristically large haul of points, then the C44 may well become an entrant into the pantheon of point-less cars. It may not exactly sound like exalted company, but there's a handful of niche cars that were perfectly decent contenders on their day - but failed to do the final job of troubling the scorers. Remember, points were only afforded down to sixth until 2003, and down to eighth until 2010.

Here's a little thought experiment: which was the fastest, relative to the field they raced in? For this, we'll use rankings based on the supertimes metric - a percentage based on the fastest single lap by each car at each race weekend, averaged over the season. The percentages themselves will not necessarily figure, as the field spreads are a) variable between seasons and b) the percentage gaps are much smaller in modern F1 compared to those in the 1980s and 1990s.

Sauber is the only team without a point in F1 this season

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Because of the complications involved with the earlier iterations of the constructors' championship, where only one car was made eligible to score points for what was then known as the "International Cup for Formula One Constructors", we've only selected some of the stand-out machines with an unfortunate allergy to points-scoring.

One could make the case for the current Sauber, in that it started the year ahead of Alpine and simply failed to make the most of the chances that the early season presented. There were further flashes of pace: in China, the team was seventh in the weekend supertime averages ahead of RB, Alpine, and Williams, and repeated that in Spain ahead of Haas, RB, and Williams.

Yet, the team has largely been stuck to the bottom of the supertimes order as the season has progressed, and escapes from Q1 have become increasingly rare in that time. Plus, its current supertime gap of 1.997% to the theoretical fastest car is larger than another contender on this list. We'll get to that one in a bit.

It's hard to look at the C33 as a legitimate contender for "best point-less car", simply because it was so uninspiring

Sauber does, however, have another contender: its 2014 C33. Since Peter Sauber resumed control of his eponymous outfit from BMW in late 2009, the team had started to grow in competitiveness despite limited finance compared to some of the other teams on the grid. The 2012 season was arguably the peak of its second spell as a 'privateer' team, as Sergio Perez and Kamui Kobayashi both put the C31 on the podium, but 2014 had brought the team's status as a midfielder capable of surprise results into disrepute.

Per the 2014 season's supertimes ranking, the Sauber C33 was the eighth-fastest car ahead of Lotus, Marussia, and Caterham. Lotus, with its twin-tusk E22, ended up banking 10 points that year despite its horrendous balance issues and the unreliability of its Renault power unit, while Marussia took two at Monaco thanks to a starring drive from the late Jules Bianchi. Bianchi's gain was Sauber's loss; at the same Monaco race, Esteban Gutierrez was set to get Sauber off the mark while running eighth, but hit the barrier at Rascasse and took himself out of contention.

But it's hard to look at the C33 as a legitimate contender for "best point-less car", simply because it was so uninspiring. It was overweight, to the point where Adrian Sutil ate nothing for two days to get his weight down. And, in truth, it was only 0.1% quicker over the season than Lotus - in short, slightly quicker than a car that was terrible and lucky to score those 10 points. Thus, we can count the C33 out of the running, particularly as it was the car that rather pushed Sauber to the brink of oblivion.

Let's look at a few more chronologically, starting with 1983's ATS D6. Designed by Gustav Brunner, the D6 was one of the early converts to a carbonfibre monocoque arrangement, but Brunner innovated by moulding the chassis with the bodywork - rather than draping separate composite bodywork over the top of a folded-panel chassis. The powerful BMW M12/13 was lodged in the back. Gunter Schmid's outfit was a single-car effort, with Manfred Winkelhock on driving duties, and the German was a near-mainstay among the top 10 on the grid.

Sauber was slightly quicker than Lotus in 2014 though was not rewarded with points during a tough maiden season of hybrid regulations

Photo by: Patrik Lundin / Motorsport Images

It's those qualifying performances that explains the D6's presence here. Per 1983's supertimes rankings, ATS stands at seventh overall: faster than both Williams and McLaren in terms of outright pace - the teams that finished fourth and fifth in that year's constructors' standings with 38 and 34 points apiece.

This was admittedly at a time where there were great discrepancies between qualifying performances and race results. McLaren rarely broke into the top 10 in 1983, notably scoring a 1-2 finish at Long Beach after starting 22nd and 23rd on the grid.

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But the ATS was crucially unreliable; although the BMW was a hugely powerful engine, it was notoriously prone to bursting at the seams. Meanwhile, Winkelhock had the one-lap speed but perhaps not the race pace to get the most out of the car. In the 5 May 1983 edition of Autosport, Nigel Roebuck described Winkelhock as "while immensely brave, is hardly a front-rank driver". Had the D6 been run by a better-funded team, then there was latent potential to extract.

Friday favourite: Why Winkelhock was a fantastic team-mate

Perhaps the reverse applied to Minardi's M187, which was underpowered thanks to the bulky and gutless Motori Moderni engine in the back. And yet, the M187 sits eighth on the 1987 supertimes rankings, above scorers Tyrrell (which took 11 points that year), Larrousse (three points), Zakspeed (two points) and the one-point trio of Ligier, March, and AGS.

This was almost entirely down to the efforts of Alessandro Nannini, who frequently put the car in the middle of the grid and fought against more powerful machinery before the M187 could inevitably expect to suffer from reliability issues. It was at least a vehicle for Nannini to show his class, earning the Italian a step up to Benetton for 1988. 

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In the meantime, Minardi scored points in both 1988 and 1989, but returned to the ignominy of non-scoredom in 1990. With the time-tested Cosworth DFR in the back, Minardi at least had a semi-solid basis to work from rather than the Motori Moderni (which designed the disastrous Subaru 1235 flat-12 in the Coloni). Minardi stands seventh in that year's ranking of supertimes, above Leyton House, Lotus, Brabham, and Arrows, thanks to Pierluigi Martini's oft-ridiculous turns of pace in qualifying.

This season ranking is skewed by his second on the grid at the Phoenix season opener, and eighth on the grid in Brazil in the old car, although Martini made it into the top 10 in qualifying four times with the M190. The Minardis punched above their respective weights on a timed lap, but that was rather down to the drivers over the car.

Superb qualifying effort from Martini at Phoenix in 1990 was unrewarded with points

There's one more challenger for the "best point-less car" honour, and it's arguably less of a surprise than some of the other entrants: the BAR 01.

The zip-liveried maiden effort from the team borne from Tyrrell's assets was about as reliable as a McDonald's ice cream machine, and the object of hubristic declarations from the team's management that it could expect to win its maiden race. One of the reasons for its unpalatable proclivity for breaking down was that the internal components could not deal with the vibrations from the Supertec engine, something that Benetton and Williams knew how to mitigate.

Jacques Villeneuve could at least be relied upon to plonk the car into the top 10 on the grid on a regular basis. He qualified fifth at Imola, before the gearbox conked out at the start. Sixth on the grid at Spain was converted into third at the start, and Villeneuve was running fifth before - again - the gearbox gave up while running fifth. It took him until the Belgian Grand Prix, the 12th round of the season, before he registered a finish. Ricardo Zonta and Mika Salo had managed just five in the other car up to that point.

The inability to contain the Supertec quite literally shook up its best laid plans, and an upgrade to the engine mid-season actually exacerbated the situation

The Canadian was on the cusp of points at the chaotic Nurburgring race and sat fifth as the race drew to a close, but his clutch failed with five laps remaining. It just wasn't to be.

Thing is, the BAR 01 stands sixth in the 1999 supertimes, ahead of fellow Supertec runner Benetton and the other points-getters in Sauber, Prost, Arrows, and Minardi. Its season average is just 1.895% shy of the theoretical fastest lap, a smaller gap compared to the modern day Sauber - quite remarkable when one considers the bigger field spreads of the late '90s. BAR was also just 0.2% slower than Williams, which managed podium finishes through Ralf Schumacher throughout 1999.

PLUS: Was 1999 F1's most exciting season?

Both the ATS D6 and BAR 01 had unfulfilled potential that largely spanned the entire season, while Sauber had a small window at the start of 2024 that it could not deliver on. Thus, it's probably fair to say that the ATS and BAR are the final contenders ahead of Sauber's C44 for the accolade that nobody wants.

On paper, BAR has the best credentials here: a car that was easily top of the midfield if it could simply stop breaking. The team's relative inexperience of F1, having largely supplanted Tyrrell's workforce with that of Reynard, proved to be its downfall; the inability to contain the Supertec quite literally shook up its best laid plans, and an upgrade to the engine mid-season actually exacerbated the situation.

The BAR 01 made a wave in more ways than one in 1999, yet failed to score

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

Bankrolled by British American Tobacco, the team had a nearly bottomless pit of finance and still couldn't fix the car, although its potential was at least demonstrated in fits and spurts by Villeneuve's star quality. The 2000 season with Honda power showed what the team should have been capable of in year one.

By comparison, ATS had little finance, a powerful yet combustible engine, and a driver that showed strong one-lap pace but rarely did the job in race trim. Brunner's chassis was also ahead of its time, and it took a few years for the fully moulded monocoque to enter F1's design zeitgeist. Regularly outpacing both Williams and McLaren in qualifying also earns it some credit here.

It's difficult to choose between them, and this writer could agonise for hours over which one we'll choose. So here's what we'll do...

"And the award for Formula 1's Best Point-Less Car goes to...the BAR 01 AND the ATS D6."

Sheesh, what a cop-out.

Winkelhock in his ATS D6, the joint best-worst F1 car!

Photo by: Motorsport Images