How Sauber created its greatest legacy

Mercedes had a plan when it announced its motorsport comeback in January 1988. It stretched far beyond its immediate return to the circuits in the World Sports-Prototype Championship and the DTM that season.

Formula 1 was very much in the plan for Mercedes, and it was going to do it with its own team racing Silver Arrows and with German-speaking drivers on its books. Which explains the German manufacturer's junior programme of 1990-91 that introduced Michael Schumacher, Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Karl Wendlinger to the wider world.

Mercedes didn't talk about F1 when it ended an exile from the circuits that stretched all the way back to the end of 1955 and a decision made in the wake of that year's Le Mans 24 Hours disaster. Nor did it reveal what it had in the plan for the trio of tyros when it kicked off the junior programme over the 1989/90 off-season.

But the car maker's ambition to return to F1 provided the rationale for plucking the talented youngsters out of the junior single-seater ranks and giving them each a part-season in the WSPC in 1990 alongside their single-seater programmes. Schumacher, Frentzen and Wendlinger would share out the races in the second Team Sauber Mercedes entry alongside veteran Jochen Mass.

"F1 was always part of the plan, but we kept it secret because our immediate priority was success in sportscars," recalls Jochen Neerpasch, who became the first Mercedes motorsport boss since Alfred Neubauer, the architect of the marque's successes either side of World War 2. "We developed a medium-term strategy for Mercedes in motorsport.

"This strategy called for Mercedes to return in top-end motorsport with the Sauber team in Group C, to develop Sauber into a very professional operation in sportscar racing and after a few years, when the team has developed and the know-how was there, to move into F1 with two Mercedes Silver Arrows.

"But the idea was not only to develop on the technical side. We also wanted to develop drivers for F1. This is why we started the junior programme. It was always in the development plan."

Neerpasch wanted Mercedes to have its 'own' drivers, ones associated with the brand, and it was important that they were from a German-speaking country.

"We wanted the cars to be Silver Arrows when we got to F1 and we knew because of that we would get more attention from the media at home if we had drivers from Germany or Austria," he explains.

Mercedes ended up with the top three from the 1989 German Formula 3 Championship, though its selection process began long before Wendlinger, Schumacher and Frentzen ended up separated by a solitary point at the top of the final classification. It also looked beyond their results in F3.

"We didn't only look at that season, but their whole careers and how they developed," recalls Neerpasch. "We wanted guys who had showed that they could develop as drivers."

"Frentzen was the one who was spontaneously fast, but the most methodical driver was Schumacher. It wasn't just that he had talent, it was his whole mental approach" Jochen Mass

Wendlinger, who ended up winning the German F3 crown by a solitary point with Helmut Marko's eponymous team, remembers the initial approach from Mercedes coming long before the end of the season.

"They started talking to me in the summer," says the Austrian. "I remember they invited me to the Spa WSPC round, so I could see what sportscar racing was all about."

What he didn't know was that Neerpasch was also in contact with his rivals for the German F3 crown. That explains his surprise when he turned up at his first test with Sauber at Paul Ricard in the late autumn of '89 to find Schumacher and Frentzen also present.

"It was like, 'oh you're here as well'," remembers Wendlinger. "None of us knew that Mercedes had been talking to the others."

Frentzen proved to be the quickest of the three over initial testing at Ricard and Jerez. Neerpasch says that he felt that he was the most gifted of his young signings.

"Heinz-Harald was the one who seemed to have the most natural talent," he explains. "He was fast straight away and didn't seem to care if the car was good or not. Michael and Karl had to sort the car to how they wanted it before they could perform."

But it was Schumacher who had the strongest work ethic, continues Neerpasch.

"He was the one who worked hardest," he says. "He concentrated fully on the job and worked with the engineers in the best way, and this is the reason he performed so well."

Mass has similar memories: "Frentzen was the one who was spontaneously fast, but the most methodical driver was Schumacher. It wasn't just that he had talent, it was his whole mental approach.

"He had everything, including an understanding that he had to be politically smart. It was pretty obvious to me that he could go on to be F1 world champion, given the right car and the right circumstances."

Wendlinger and Schumacher were both race winners in the WSPC aboard the Sauber-Mercedes C11 in 1990. Wendlinger triumphed at Spa in June and Schumacher at the season finale in Mexico City, both in partnership with Mass.

Frentzen would race a Sauber just once, finishing second at Donington Park in September, before ducking out of the young driver programme to concentrate on Formula 3000. Wendlinger and Schumacher were then paired together for 1991 in what had been re-christened the Sportscar World Championship aboard the new 3.5-litre Mercedes C291.

The car, powered by a flat-configuration 12-cylinder engine, wasn't a match for the Jaguar XJR-14 nor the Peugeot 905 after it became the 905 Evo 1 Bis following a dramatic mid-season make-over.

The C291's designer, Leo Ress, suspects that Sauber had become complacent after the runaway success of the Mercedes C11 in 1990, and it didn't help that development of the car was held back by the poor reliability of its radical powerplant.

Mercedes had helped Schumacher and Wendlinger into F1, but Neerpasch insists that the duo remained at the call of the German manufacturer

The problem was fundamental: it was caused by a casting issue that resulted in a run of retirements for Schumacher and Wendlinger and team-mates Jean-Louis Schlesser and Mass. One of the engines held together long enough for the young guns to notch up the design's only victory in the final race of the season in Japan at Autopolis in October.

By then Schumacher and Wendlinger had both made it onto the F1 grid, the former with Jordan at Spa in August, the latter with Leyton House at Suzuka the week before Autopolis. Schumacher, of course, was quickly poached by Benetton, whose new engineering boss Tom Walkinshaw knew all about Schumacher's talents from his TWR sportscar team's campaigns with Jaguar.

Mercedes had helped Schumacher and Wendlinger into F1, but Neerpasch insists that the duo remained at the call of the German manufacturer: "The contracts said as soon Mercedes is entering F1, they come back to us."

Mercedes had also gone public on its F1 aspirations, with a 1993 entry planned. It had recruited former Hesketh, Wolf and Ferrari designer Harvey Postlethwaite from Tyrrell to head up the development of a Mercedes F1 car at Sauber HQ in Switzerland.

But back in Autopolis the victory for Schumacher and Wendlinger proved to be bittersweet. Inside a month, the top management of Mercedes parent company Daimler-Benz had canned the F1 entry for what it called "social and ecological reasons" and axed the sportscar progamme.

Neerpasch insists that the real reason was the massive redundancies at Damiler-Benz subsidiary AEG, the electrical goods company in whose colours Team Sauber Mercedes had raced in 1988.

"The business wasn't going well, they had to make a lot of people redundant, so Mercedes couldn't then decide to spend a lot of money in motor racing," he says.

Sauber opted to push on into F1 in '93 without Mercedes and Postlethwaite. But the Ilmor-powered Sauber C12 did bear the words "Concept by Mercedes-Benz" when it hit the track. A year later, the engine had the German manufacturer's name on its cam covers and one season after that Mercedes had partnered with McLaren.

It wasn't what Neerpasch had envisaged as he helped plot Merc's motorsport return.

"In our strategy group we said Mercedes should not be an engine delivery company," he explains. "If you look at the example of McLaren, it had been world champion with Ford, Porsche [TAG] and Honda, so Mercedes would only be one of many engine suppliers that had come before. We made it very clear that we had to have our own F1 car."

Schumacher would get to race a Silver Arrow in F1 just like Neerpasch had hoped. It would just take another 18 years.