The Sauber Formula 1 team announced Wednesday that they had signed F2 points leader Gabriel Bortoleto to the team on a multi-year deal beginning with the 2025 F1 season.

By Michael McClure and Martin Lloyd

In his first F1 season with Sauber, Bortoleto, 20, will partner Nico Hülkenberg, who was announced as the team’s first driver for 2025 in April.

Bortoleto’s signing, confirmed to be a multi-year deal, follows Wednesday morning’s news that the team would not be re-signing Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu for the 2025 season. The pair have formed the team’s line-up since the 2022 F1 season, but neither of them has a seat on the F1 grid for 2025.

The news puts an end to months-long speculation over who would partner Hülkenberg and whether that driver would be the experienced Bottas, a 10-time grand prix winner and two-time championship runner-up, or an unproven rookie such as Bortoleto.

It means the team have overlooked the two primary F1 prospects in their junior programme: reserve driver Théo Pourchaire, the 2023 F2 champion, and 2024 signing Zane Maloney, currently third in the F2 standings. While Maloney will join the Lola Yamaha Abt Formula E team for the all-electric series’ 2024–25 season starting next month, Pourchaire’s 2025 racing plans have yet to be announced.

Unlike F2 peers Ollie Bearman and Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who had been mooted for F1 seats since before the season began, McLaren junior Bortoleto featured little in silly season discussions earlier in the year. But a strong run of form in the second-tier series over the summer and a timely last-to-first feature race win in Monza in September boosted his stock.

Hours after that race, he was spotted on the grid for the Italian Grand Prix in discussions with Mattia Binotto, Sauber’s chief operating officer and chief technical officer. That meeting set racing paddocks alight with rumours about a potential F1 promotion away from the team that had guided his career over the past year.

Bortoleto joined the McLaren Driver Development Programme in October 2023, a month after winning the 2023 F3 crown as a rookie. In his first year in F2 with Invicta Racing, he has taken two wins and three further podiums and leads the standings by 4.5 points over Red Bull junior Isack Hadjar.

Bortoleto’s status as a McLaren junior posed a hurdle to his F1 hopes, with both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri under contract at the Woking-based constructor through the 2026 season. The team reportedly remained open to Bortoleto’s holding negotiations with Sauber but insisted on keeping an option on the Brazilian driver, their sole junior programme member in F2.

Amid growing speculation in the past week that Sauber would drop Bottas and sign Bortoleto for 2025, McLaren appeared to pivot course. Five days ago, on the Friday of the Brazilian Grand Prix weekend, team principal Andrea Stella said that McLaren would not stand in Bortoleto’s way if there was a possibility that he would race in F1 with a rival.

Bortoleto will become the first Brazilian driver to take the start of an F1 grand prix since Pietro Fittipaldi raced for Haas at the 2020 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. He will also become the first full-time Brazilian F1 driver since Felipe Massa, whose F1 career spanned from 2002 to his retirement in 2017.

He joins Sauber a year before the Ferrari-powered Swiss team are set to be taken over by Audi and run the German auto manufacturer’s power units. F1 will adopt new power unit and aerodynamic regulations in 2026.

Sauber, who have raced in F1 since 1993, have zero points in the standings and are set for only their second scoreless year after 2014, with their best result an 11th-place finish at the season opener in Bahrain courtesy of Zhou. Finishing 10th and last in the constructors’ standings would give Sauber the smallest portion of the prize money allocated to F1’s teams at the end of each season.

Bortoleto’s path to F1

Bortoleto, born 14 October 2004, is the first member of his family to race in F1 but not the first with ties to motorsport. His older brother Enzo Bortoleto, 26, competed in single-seaters in the mid-2010s, finishing 11th in British F3 in 2016. Both brothers use their mother’s surname in competition.

Since 2020, their father, telecommunications entrepreneur Lincoln Oliveira, has been the primary owner of the Stock Car Pro Series, which enjoys substantial popularity in Brazil. The family own the KTF Sports racing team competing in Stock Car and formerly in Brazilian F4, the single-seater championship on the Vicar-organised racing package. Oliveira will assume the position of Vicar CEO in 2025.

As Enzo returned to Brazil for 2017 when his European single-seater hopes dried up, Bortoleto moved in the other direction, leaving his native Brazil at the age of 12 to compete in European karting. That year, he finished seventh in the OK-Junior class of the Karting World Championship, while in 2018 he took third in both the world and European karting championships in the same category.

In 2019, he moved to senior karting but failed to find great success, with a seventh-place finish in the WSK Super Master Series his best championship placement.

In 2020, he stepped up to single-seaters for an Italian F4 campaign with Prema Racing, finishing fifth with four poles but only one win.

The following year, he moved up to Formula Regional Europe in its first year following its merger with Formula Renault Eurocup. Competing for the MP Motorsport–run FA Racing team, Bortoleto finished 15th in the standings with 44 points and as the lead driver on his team.

A second year in the series, this time with frontrunners R-ace GP, yielded a sixth-place finish with two wins, while his two rounds in FR Asia with the team over the winter brought him his first win at the Regional level.

Bortoleto was a solid but not spectacular talent in his first three years of single-seater competition, but his 2023 F3 campaign with Trident was what really turned heads.

Lining up at Trident as a relatively unfancied rookie, he set the tone for his campaign by winning the opening two feature races of the year in Bahrain and Melbourne. Those results gave him a 20-point advantage after just four races, and even though he never won another F3 race, his consistent points scoring brought him to the brink of the F3 title by the final round in Monza.

He sealed the crown on the Friday of the race weekend after neither of his two main rivals, Mercedes junior Paul Aron and Red Bull junior Pepe Martí, secured pole position on Friday. He ultimately won the title with 164 points, 45 more than runner-up Zak O’Sullivan of Prema, and gave Trident its first-ever drivers’ title in any series after 18 years of competition.

While there was little doubt over where Bortoleto’s 2024 seat would be, with rumours suggesting that he had signed for Invicta’s F2 team as early as April 2023 and McLaren not long after, the news only became official on 27 November. That announcement came the day after the 2023 F2 season finale in Abu Dhabi, where Bortoleto stayed the team, then called Virtuosi, as a guest. 

His F2 season, run in the series’ new Dallara F2 2024 chassis, began with pole in his first qualifying session at Bahrain after pacesetting teammate Kush Maini’s disqualification. The Brazilian led the field away at the feature race, but a first-corner clash with eventual title rival Hadjar meant he picked up damage and a 10-second penalty and finished fifth at the flag.

After this setback, he failed to score in four consecutive races, retiring from the Jeddah feature race and both races at Melbourne. It was only at Imola in May that his season improved, beginning with his first F2 podium, a second place, in the feature race.

Bortoleto sat 12th entering Imola, but thanks to eight consecutive points finishes, he climbed to third by the end of June, when he took his maiden win in Austria. He started that race third but led by lap five, winning by an eventual margin of 4.2 seconds over current Williams F1 driver Franco Colapinto and Hadjar.

In the next three feature races, Bortoleto finished sixth, fourth and second, proving that as it did in F3, consistency underlay his season.

The crowning moment of Bortoleto’s season came at Monza, where he snatched a record-breaking victory from the least likely of starting positions. A spin in qualifying left him with significant floor damage, no competitive lap time and a 22nd-place start for both races.

In Saturday’s sprint race, he recovered from last to joint eighth – forming one half of an astonishing tied result with MP’s Deninis Hauger, a first in series history. By the end of the first lap of the feature race, he had already made up a stunning seven places, but a well-timed safety car helped him make up the remaining ground by granting him a pit stop. Bortoleto took the net race lead and never looked back, winning with a margin of 9.4 seconds over Maloney.

Crucially, with then-leader Hadjar failing to score, Bortoleto closed the championship gap from 36 points before the round to just 10.5 points before the twelfth round of the season in Baku. As Campos endured a disastrous weekend and Hadjar again failed to score, Bortoleto took fifth- and fourth-place finishes and secured the championship lead for the first time. He departed Azerbaijan with a slender advantage of just 4.5 points over Hadjar. 

Before taking up his place in F1, Bortoleto will contest the final two rounds of the F2 season in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, with 78 points still on offer. Invicta hold a 35.5-point lead over Campos in the teams’ standings with 130 points available.

While the McLaren tie-up was a crucial boost to his F1 hopes, there were two other important F1 connections he would come to forge over the past two years. In September 2022, he had joined two-time F1 champion Fernando Alonso’s newly created A14 Management scheme, marking a reunion with the driver whose FA Racing brand he had represented in 2021.

Alonso quickly became one of Bortoleto’s most vocal supporters, and the relationship maintained intact even as the Aston Martin F1 driver’s protégé signed for the development programme of rival marque McLaren, for whom the Spaniard raced in 2007 and again from 2015 to 2018.

The director of the McLaren Driver Development Programme at the time of Bortoleto’s signing was Emmanuele Pirro, an F1 driver from 1989 to 1991 and a six-time class winner of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the 2000s. Pirro left McLaren in April 2024 and became the new director of the FIA Single-Seater Commission in May. McLaren’s business operations director Stephanie Carlin, a fixture of junior single-seaters, assumed responsibility for the junior programme.

Notably, Pirro’s younger son Goffredo Pirro, better known as Goofy, is a longtime Prema engineer who worked with Bortoleto during his 2020 Italian F4 campaign. His elder son Cristoforo Pirro was a performance engineer at Sauber from 2017 to 2024, engineering Zhou in 2022 until the 2023 United States Grand Prix and Bottas from the 2023 Mexico City Grand Prix until his departure from Sauber after this year’s Italian Grand Prix.

Bortoleto has yet to complete a free practice session this year and thus has less running in F1 cars than Bearman, Antonelli and Jack Doohan, the other three drivers confirmed to be making their full-time bows next year. Nevertheless, he drove McLaren’s 2022 F1 challenger, the MCL36, as part of the team’s testing previous cars programme at the Red Bull Ring on 6 September.

In free practice sessions earlier this year, McLaren fielded the outfit’s IndyCar driver Pato O’Ward in his home race in Mexico City, while Sauber fielded the IndyCar-bound Ferrari-backed driver Robert Shwartzman in the Netherlands and Mexico City. Since the 2022 season, each F1 team has been required to run a rookie in at least two free practice sessions.

Header photo credit: Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber