In serious contrast to last season, all eyes are not on the Sauber F1 team as the circus heads to Melbourne for the first race of the season. After signing no less than five drivers ahead of the 2015 season to fill two seats, Sauber surprisingly had their seats filled and confirmed pretty much before anybody else did. For the first time since 2012, the team will be running an unchanged pairing, after both of their drivers had solid if unspectacular seasons in 2015. As the only team to not run their 2016 car at the first Barcelona test, it could be argued that this will hinder Sauber, but as Force India showed in 2015 as they took their best result since the Jordan days (they did the first few races with a revised 2014 car), that is not always a bad thing. The Sauber F1 2016 car will also be running Ferrari’s new innovative power unit, which could prove to be handy. However, they have challengers in newcomers Haas and in Toro Rosso (the latter with old power units) as to who will be top Ferrari customer come November.
The Drivers
Marcus Ericsson
2014: Caterham
2015-: Sauber
2013 GP2 series sixth placed driver
Swedish driver Marcus Ericsson starts his third season as a F1 driver. He has shown gradual improvement during his time in sport but we are yet to see much which is truly spectacular. He picked up considerably fewer points than his team mate last season but the races in which he seemed to perform better in he left with fewer or no rewards. Perhaps continuity at the Sauber team will help him get off to a better start as he started off fairly slowly last season despite scoring his first F1 points at Australia.
Felipe Nasr
2014-: Williams (Reserve driver)
2015-: Sauber
2014 GP2 series third placed driver
Brazilian Felipe Nasr got his F1 career off to a brilliant start last year with a fantastic fifth at Melbourne – the highest position for a Brazilian driver on his F1 debut. That, paired with sixth at Russia helped him finish ahead of his team mate last season, as well as ahead of both McLaren drivers as well as Pastor Maldonado and Carlos Sainz, despite generally being matched by his team mate across the season. In what turned out to be a pretty interesting battle last year, hopefully the two will appear matched again this year.
Testing
Sauber did the entirety of the first test with their 2015 car so their 2016 machine has completed the fewest laps of all the cars. This will almost certainly harm them in the opening races and I fear that they could slip back into the sort of position they were in during the 2014 season, where they were simply nowhere. The car seemed pretty unspectacular in testing.
Prediction
Sauber could be in for a very challenging year. New rivals Haas seemed to be more impressive in testing albeit less reliable. Sauber has two drivers who are fairly even in terms of pace, but neither seems to be particularly special. The likes of Manor and McLaren will be all the more threatening to Sauber as well this year. Sauber endured a point-less year in 2014, and a similar fate could bestow them this year. Finishing eleventh would be a complete disaster for the team, but it seems likely that it could happen.
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