CAN ALFA ROMEO AND LECLERC TURN SAUBER AROUND?

It’s going to take a lot more than a historic brand name and a future superstar to move Sauber up the grid, but they will help. Under Frederic Vasseur, who I rate very highly, the team has been doing a lot of restructuring and has got some good people on board, including Luca Furbatto, Eric Gandelin, Nicolas Hennel and

Jorg Zander, a Sauber man through and through.

The team obviously had a tough three years with all the financial and ownership issues, but these appear to have been settled. With the closer alliance with Maranello, Sauber will greatly benefit and, in fact, just switching to a current-spec power unit will probably give them half a second of lap time.

Charles Leclerc is a name I expect to hear for a long time in F1. He’s very fast, has an extremely calm and mature head on his shoulders and works very hard, with no real ego. This is a winning combination and although he’s unlikely to do any winning in a Sauber, his main target has got to be to comprehensively beat Marcus Ericsson and get himself in line for the Ferrari seat for when they finally stop giving Kimi Raikkonen his seemingly endless run of one-year contract extensions!