In the paddock: Adam Cooper

In the wake of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari promotion, the F1 giant continues its show of faith in youth as Antonio Giovinazzi gets his big break at Sauber

“THIS IS F1  ONE WEEK YOU ARE A HERO, ONE WEEK YOU ARE NOT REALLY GOOD”

Italy has not had a full-time grand prix driver since Jarno Trulli and Tonio Liuzzi were last on the entry list back in 2011. That changes next season as Antonio Giovinazzi joins Kimi Raikkonen at Sauber in what could develop into a fascinating contest between the ambitious Ferrari protege and the veteran former world champion.

Giovinazzi has been placed at Sauber by Ferrari in another impressive show of faith in young talent by the Maranello team. It scored a hit with Charles Leclerc, now propelled into a works seat after a single year of apprenticeship, and Giovinazzi is the next man in line – although perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he’s catching up with the Monegasque driver, having been leapfrogged in Ferrari’s affections last year.

Maurizio Arrivabene and his colleagues have followed through on a bold strategy, and it’s interesting to make a comparison with Mercedes and Toto Wolff’s struggles to place his proteges.

It was in September 2016 that Giovinazzi first hooked up with Ferrari. Starring in GP2 with Prema Racing, he had a run in the Ferrari simulator and did well enough to land a reserve role with the team and some winter testing with Sauber.

When Pascal Wehrlein declared himself unfit after the first day of running in Australia last year, Giovinazzi was drafted in on Saturday morning and acquitted himself well in difficult circumstances.

Retained for the next race in China, he had a heavy accident coming onto the pit straight in qualifying and then a second one – in the same place – during the race.

Teams expect rookies to make mistakes, but the double whammy in Shanghai generated an unfair impression around the paddock that Giovinazzi was a crasher, and another off in

FP1 for Haas in Hungary later in the year didn’t help.

Meanwhile, Leclerc gained momentum with his superb F2 performances, and the push to land him an F1 seat in 2018 proved irresistible. Thus, when the time came for Maranello to nominate a Sauber driver – a contractual legacy of the new engine supply deal and Alfa Romeo sponsorship – Leclerc got the nod. Giovinazzi had to be content with a third-driver role at Ferrari, and the promise of some FP1S with Sauber.

It wasn’t easy for Giovinazzi to be overtaken by a younger guy who had come through the ranks just behind him. The upside was that he knew that Ferrari owned the right to nominate a Sauber driver. So the better Leclerc performed in 2018, the more likely it was that he would be promoted to the works team, thus leaving a space for Giovinazzi to slot into.

To his credit, Giovinazzi got on with the job and impressed the team with his simulator running, while gaining some useful experience with an outing at Le Mans for AF Corse.

In the background his canny manager Enrico Zanarini – well connected with Ferrari – continued to hustle on his behalf.

All they could really do was wait and see if Leclerc did well enough to guarantee a graduation to the works team for 2019.

Fairly early on in the year, that already seemed a certainty, not least because Sergio Marchionne was clearly pushing for it. But after the Ferrari boss’s sudden death, the picture was less clear for a while – perhaps Raikkonen would stay on after all…

When Leclerc was finally confirmed, the issue was clouded by Raikkonen’s immediate move to Sauber. Was Kimi taking the Ferrari slot originally earmarked for Giovinazzi, or was he potentially stealing the other seat from Marcus Ericsson? It turned out to be the latter.

“Kimi was not the Ferrari driver,”says Sauber team boss

Fred Vasseur.“kimi was informed by Ferrari that they stopped the project together and he was on the market.”

Ferrari faced a tricky decision. The team appreciated having Giovinazzi on board as its simulator driver and, with Daniil Kvyat already destined for Toro Rosso, it was wary of losing another valuable asset.

The catch-22 was that if Ferrari didn’t place Giovinazzi at Sauber in order to keep him on sim duty, he would have walked away rather than spend another year on the sidelines.

So Ferrari went for it, and nominated him for its Sauber seat. After some soul-searching by Sauber owner Hans Rausing, Ericsson’s long-time patron, it was eventually confirmed that Giovinazzi did indeed have the race drive.

Giovinazzi turns 25 in December, and thus he goes into 2019 with more experience than the typical modern-day rookie. And he’s a more complete driver than when he had those first Sauber outings. It’s now in his hands to show what he can do – and put that Shanghai nightmare behind him.

“After Melbourne everyone was really happy and my name was on the top,”he says.“and then after Shanghai my name was really down! This is F1 – one week you are a hero, one week you are not really good. This was my problem – to finish my experience in F1 with this race weekend in Shanghai was not the best.”