Invicta Racing engineer Pau Rivera was the voice in Gabriel Bortoleto’s ear during the Sauber Formula 1 rookie’s 2024 title charge in F2. Just days before the 20-year-old sealed the drivers’ championship in Abu Dhabi last month, Feeder Series caught up with Rivera to find out what made the pairing so successful.

By Michael McClure

In a year of great change for Invicta – with a new F2 car, an all-new line-up and a new team name thanks to Invicta Watch Group’s purchase of an ownership stake over the winter – a few key figures provided the stability that helped guide them to the teams’ and drivers’ titles.

One of those was race engineer Pau Rivera, who has been at the Norfolk-based team since 2016. He engineered 2017 F2 runner-up Artem Markelov at what was then called Russian Time until 2018. 

Then, once Markelov left and the team resumed use of the Virtuosi Racing name, the Spaniard was the race engineer for Guanyu Zhou from 2019 to 2021 and for Jack Doohan in 2022 and 2023.

While Rivera could already boast an unusually strong track record of engineering eventual F1 drivers, his partnership with Bortoleto in 2024 was the most successful in terms of results. They first crossed paths about a year and a half ago, as the Brazilian began preparing for his graduation to F2.

“I met him in the middle of 2023,” Rivera tells Feeder Series from the Abu Dhabi paddock. “[We] just had a chat. It was very good. Overall, it’s always been very good with him – always very motivated, very committed, very focused, willing, with a lot of passion and desire.

“And then really, for real, we met here in Abu Dhabi. End-of-year testing last year is when we started working together, and same thing. It’s always been the same kind of attitude of trying to learn, improve. It’s been very easy with him.”

Bortoleto arrived in Abu Dhabi in 2023 having taken a dominant F3 title victory as a rookie with Trident earlier in the year. He was hot property not only among F2’s teams but also among F1’s junior driver programmes, and McLaren’s ultimately won his signature. He was unveiled as a member of the team’s driver development scheme a month after his title win. 

The dynamic brought change for both Bortoleto and Rivera, whose previous three drivers were all affiliated with what is currently Alpine in F1. But his driver’s status as a McLaren junior and the presence of associated personnel had little bearing on his job as engineer.

“We’re here to try to help them learn, develop, go fast on track, so that doesn’t change whether they are affiliated to a Formula 1 team or not,” Rivera says.

“The fact that you are affiliated to a Formula 1 team, it can be both ways. It can go the way of [putting] a lot of pressure and you start making mistakes and so on, or it can also go the way of … helping you also to develop and improve.

“In the case of Gabi, I think he’s been the second. Maybe at the beginning of the year we tried to do a bit more than what we could at some points, but in general I think he’s been exceptional at managing the potential future in F1 risk because that’s something that can trick you into not having good performances. And he’s been super capable of leaving that aside and just focusing on the job on track.”

As was the case in F3, Bortoleto didn’t take long to get used to the demands of the F2 car, which was new to the entire field in 2024. He snatched pole position right away in Bahrain after pacesetting teammate Kush Maini’s disqualification from the qualifying session.

But while Bortoleto won his first two F3 races, he had a rockier start to 2024 when it came to results. He finished fifth in the season-opening feature race in Bahrain after getting a slow start and sustaining damage in a first-corner collision with eventual title rival Isack Hadjar.

He still left the weekend with 15 points, but those were all he scored until May. He retired from the Jeddah feature race with mechanical problems after finishing 10th in the sprint, while in Melbourne, a start-line collision with Hadjar and Pepe Martí and more early-race mechanical issues took him out of the sprint and feature respectively.

“It was a bit painful to see,” Rivera says. “It wasn’t even that you don’t finish the race, but at least you do most of the laps. You [have] the car breaking at the start in Jeddah, also the start in Melbourne. We had essentially Jeddah and Melbourne, which was race two and three of the year, lost. Also, Bahrain is a one-off, so essentially we came to Europe with almost zero experience of racing.

“So we had to start from scratch, which put us on the back foot, but at the same time we’ve been very fortunate to have a car and driver combo that has always been fast both in performance and in race trim, so that made things easy.

“We turned up to Imola and he was super quick. We were challenging for victory there, and from then on, we’ve just been building and building.”

Bortoleto took pole in Imola, the fourth round of the season, and scored a breakthrough maiden podium by finishing second in the feature race behind Hadjar.

The secret ingredient to making up that lost time, as Rivera explains, was the series’ sole in-season test at Barcelona in late April. Bortoleto topped the first day of the test before focusing on race runs during the second and third mornings while most of his rivals chased absolute pace through performance runs.

Rivera adds that Bortoleto’s mindset shone through in the wake of his tough start to the season.

“What sets him apart, I think, is the mental strength to let the Formula One dream to one side – the mental strength to have a really bad start of the year, but next race, boom, be there.”

“We’ve been able to focus weekend by weekend and it has worked out. We’ve been also lucky with the new car that as a team, we’ve been able to have a good car everywhere. That, combined with his raw speed and brain, just made it very easy.”

From Imola onwards, Bortoleto finished outside the points only twice in the final 11 rounds – both times in sprint races – and qualified in the top six in all but one races.

The exception to that final statistic came at Monza, where he spun into the gravel in qualifying and failed to set a representative time. Still, from last on the grid, he recovered to joint eighth in the sprint race before taking an improbable victory by 9.436 seconds in the feature race to set his title charge in motion.

By the end of his championship-winning season, Bortoleto was the class of the field. He finished in the top five in each of the last six races and ended the year with two wins, eight total podiums and 214.5 points while leading Invicta to their first F2 teams’ title since 2017.

Bortoleto made major improvements in his technical understanding and feedback delivery, Rivera says, but his greatest strength remained race management.

“He’s super quick, but also he’s very smart. He’s got a lot of spare capacity while he’s racing,” Rivera adds. “You always have quick drivers, but it is a bit more difficult to manage race situations or to manage difficult moments.”

That skill was apparent at the penultimate feature race of 2024 in Lusail. Moments after a virtual safety car was called on lap eight, Bortoleto entered pit lane but immediately crossed the pit entry line to avoid making an illegal pit stop. He incurred a five-second penalty as a result.

“It was unfortunate to get the penalty, but really the VSC came right at the wrong time,” Rivera says. “Even though we broke one rule, it was … the least worst scenario. He managed to react very quickly to save potentially a bigger loss.”

Once applied post-race, the penalty dropped Bortoleto from first on the road to third and meant he entered the title decider just half a point ahead of Hadjar.

But by then, he had already achieved an arguably more important goal: graduating to an F1 race seat with Sauber. He and veteran teammate Nico Hülkenberg will replace Invicta alumnus Zhou and Valtteri Bottas at the Swiss outfit.

Twelve months ago, few expected Bortoleto to follow the trajectory he did – not even his own F2 team.

“Initially, it was meant to be two years,” Rivera says about Bortoleto’s time at Invicta. “Obviously when everything goes so well, you just have him for one year, which in a way is sad because it’s been such a pleasure to work with him. So it’s sad it’s only been one year, but at the same time it’s so nice to see him moving on.”

Bortoleto will join Invicta predecessor Doohan among a large crop of rookies graduating to F1 next year. Though both demonstrated similarly blistering speed as rookies, the Australian had a tougher time in F2 and finished his two seasons sixth and third.

“The rookie year with Jack was also exceptional, super quick, but we had maybe also some issues at the beginning. It was more difficult to recover,” Rivera says.

“Then we were unlucky on the rookie year for Jack, also with people crashing into us when we could have won a race or finished second – so losing lots of points for silly things, for the small things.”

Invicta’s 2025 driver line-up comprises reigning F3 champion Leonardo Fornaroli and F2 returnee Roman Staněk, both graduates of Trident’s F3 scheme as Bortoleto was. What can they – and Rivera – learn from him?

“Take it session by session,” Rivera answers. “[Try] to learn as much as possible in testing of the team, the car, tyres, procedures, communication. I think that’s very important, the communication – driver to team, team to driver. We are all on the same page. We understand each other to be able to go in the right direction and not go in the wrong direction.”

That Thursday morning in Yas Marina, I see another side of their communication when Bortoleto emerges from the Invicta garage before his track walk and sees Rivera talking to me. The two of them exchange banter about Bortoleto’s portrayal in the interview as we all smile.

“It’s not related to how quick he is on track or the technical abilities, but he’s a super nice kid,” Rivera adds. “He’s been a pleasure to work with.”

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency