Red Bull, Petronas, BMW, Stake: the Sauber racing team gets its 14th name

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Only one thing has always remained the same in the Sauber racing team’s 31 Formula 1 years. The letter C in the model name of the cars. From the C12 to the C43 coming in 2024 – the C for the first letter of Peter Sauber’s (80) wife Christiane always lasts.

All other names and team names were changed again and again in Hinwil. The most recent example comes this week: the Swiss racing team now calls itself Stake F1 Team. So when drivers Guanyu Zhou (24) and Valtteri Bottas (34) take to the track this season, they will be racing against Williams, Haas, Alpine, McLaren, Ferrari and so on. It takes some getting used to. Also for the TV commentators, who will hardly be able to do without the term clean.

In 2010, the name is a bad joke

But the latest creation around the main sponsor is not the craziest team name in Sauber history. That must be ‘BMW Sauber F1 Team’ from 2010 – because BMW had long since left Hinwil at that point. But since the official documents for 2010 had already been completed, the team rescued by team founder Peter Sauber after the BMW breakout continued to run as BMW, at least on paper, even though a Ferrari engine roared in the car again.

The fact that the sponsors are immortalized in the team name is everyday life in Formula 1. He who pays, orders. But the name Sauber only completely disappeared from the name for the first time in 2019, when main sponsor Alfa Romeo dropped the Sauber name entirely in the second year of the collaboration.

Red Bull and Petronas enter Formula 1 via Sauber

This has never been a problem since 1993, even though the Hinwilers had very well-known partners in Mercedes, Red Bull and Petronas and were also a Ford works team at one point. Even during the years of the takeover by BMW, the term Sauber remained in the name.

With can giant Red Bull and the Malaysian oil multinational Petronas, Peter Sauber brought two brands to Formula 1 in the 1990s that had long been among the most influential in F1: the Bulls with their own team and the multiple world champion Sebastian Vettel (36) and Max Verstappen (26), Petronas as one of the great Mercedes partners in the world championships of Lewis Hamilton (38).

And now Sauber is using the term Stake to name an Australian online casino provider based in Curacao. But in some GPs the team will have to be called Kick – due to the ban on gambling advertising in certain countries, the term Stake must disappear from time to time.

Source : Blick