Sauber Team Principal Jonathan Wheatley discussed the issues encountered by his driver Gabriel Bortoleto in the 2025 US GP. In fact, the Brazilian driver ended his first race at Austin far at the back of the grid in P18, whereas teammate Nico Hulkenberg had achieved a very positive top start on Friday for the Sprint Race.
A challenging round for a rookie
Bortoleto, who has not managed to score in the past three races, unfortunately appeared rather off pace for the majority of the weekend, only managing to overtake Gasly on exhausted softs for P18.
Wheatley shuts down underperformance rumours for Bortoleto, explaining that his issues in the F1 US GP were heightened by an unfortunate strategical call.
“With Gabi, it was a tale of two hearts across the garage again. I just think we shouldn’t forget it’s Gabby’s first year in Formula 1. I know I say it a lot, but some of these circuits that we go to, having a bit of experience in these circuits makes a huge difference.
“Also, I think we were having the right conversations around the virtual safety car and then our feeling was it was going to clean very quickly. So, if we look at that, he’d have had a different race if we’d have boxed onto the virtual safety car.
“Then we elected to do something aggressive at the end, the opposite of what we did in Singapore, and it didn’t work out,” Wheatley concluded, remarking the several challenges the young driver is encountering in his debut year.
Strategical mistakes
The former Red Bull Team Principal went into further detail explaining the team miscalculation which has definitely hindered his race.
“The conversations on the pit wall were that Carlos’s car had been pulled into the gap, but I think we weren’t looking further down the track where there was some debris to clean up and some gravel to get off the track, and I think that’s what we missed out. So, yeah, we were two minutes out on our estimate of when the virtual safety car would end.”
In addition to not taking advantage of the better pit opportunity, Wheatley recalled the troubles Bortoleto had encountered by missing out on precious Practice time in the F1 US GP.
”It was a very tricky circuit. He had a slightly different set-up to Nico early on, he didn’t really get a clean run through. Because he didn’t get through to SQ2, he missed some information there. Had he been in SQ2, he might have got through to SQ3, and then get more information on that tyre.”
Lack of information
Of course, every first time track visited by a rookie on a Sprint Race weekend poses additional threats and problems to the younger drivers. Especially while comparing their performance to the one offered by a veteran F1 driver like Hulkenberg.
“So, I think he was a little bit more on the back foot going into qualifying on Saturday. And the car’s just very tricky. This is a tricky circuit, the combination of the two. There’s a very small operating window on these cars now, which is why I think these margins are so fine in terms of car performance from the beginning of the grid to the end of the grid.
“But, another learning [experience] for Gabi, and some things we could have done to help him out a little bit. There was an equipment failure in the first pit stop, which gave him a long pit stop as well. These things add up, these margins all add up.”
Positive outcomes of a challenging weekend
However, Wheatley still was able to salvage positives from Bortoleto and Sauber’s F1 US GP weekend. In fact, he believes the strong pace on display is a rather encouraging sign ahead of the next round in Mexico, consistently with the previous race as well.
Additionally, some of the challenges encountered by Bortoleto could also be found on other cars as well.
“But what was interesting again, it was a little bit like Singapore, where C45 in fresh air on its own seems to be what you could argue was the fifth fastest car today. But if you run into traffic, you just can’t seem to do anything about it. You just end up sitting there.If you look at the sawtooth plots across the grid, it’s pretty much the same for most teams.
