Who slept best last night: Mattia Binotto

With a year’s distance it does look like a total no-brainer, so it’s even difficult to imagine Mattia Binotto could’ve overlooked Gabriel Bortoleto in favour of anyone else through his binoculars. Yet, it really wasn’t.

It was around Monza in 2024 when rumours started to circulate around the paddock about Bortoleto being on Audi’s radar — even before his impressive “from last to first” victory in F2. Still just a title contender, not a champion back then, he definitely looked like a promising talent — but success in F2 is never a guarantee for F1.

How many young and promising drivers were there to choose from a year ago?

Sitting on the bench, Sauber had one of those, a former ‘future superstar’ Theo Pourchaire (unlike Bortoleto at the time, already an F2 champion) who, those close to the team say, wasn’t even considered for a promotion. The fact that the team used Robert Shwartzman (who switched to IndyCar in 2025) for FP1 outings last year speaks for itself.

And speaking about those underdelivering on huge promise, the Russian-turned-Israeli racer — whom Binotto himself was a huge fan of — also looked like a rock star in his debut Formula 2 campaign. Yet, just a year later, despite scoring pole position for the Indianapolis 500 mere months ago, Shwartzman has almost completely disappeared from F1’s radar.

And these were just two examples, both right in front of the Italians’ eyes.

It’s almost common knowledge in the paddock that Valtteri Bottas even signed a contract extension with Sauber in early autumn, only to hand it to the new team boss who kept the Finn waiting. That signed piece of paper probably sat on Binotto’s desk for a while — maybe he even felt, at some point, like grabbing a pen and signing it — but as discussions progressed with Bortoleto, and with the Brazilian’s performances getting better and better in F2, it must have first gathered dust, then sunk under a pile of documents on helpful suggestions for how to improve the team’s pitstops — finally ending at the bottom of the stack.

By the time F1 got to the Brazilian GP, Bottas’ contract extension had no doubt been carefully filed into a shredder.

Valtteri Bottas, Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

You’ll never know in full detail what these talks with Bortoleto were about — but don’t make the mistake of thinking the final decision was only about his titles. It never is in F1. Results do, indeed, prove Gabriel’s exceptional talent. But his place in the select club of those who won both F3 and F2 on the first attempt was sealed only after he already had his F1 seat. Still, results wouldn’t have been Binotto’s only reason.

Ask Carlos Sainz, and he’ll tell you how amazed he was to find out Binotto’s Ferrari had studied his whole career, down to karting performances, before approaching him in 2020. It was his work ethic, his methodical approach that the Italian was looking for when replacing Sebastian Vettel.

Here, it might have been Bortoleto’s eagerness to learn and his ability to absorb information like a sponge that really convinced the new man at the helm of Audi’s F1 project — and perhaps also Gabriel’s personal likeability.

It was back in Bahrain during pre-season testing when a conversation with Nico Hulkenberg’s manager caught me off guard. “Such a nice guy,” Raoul Spanger, the German driver’s right-hand man, said in what was just a private conversation — usually with any driver’s manager you’d never hear a single nice word about the guy on the other side of the garage. Sitting with a journalist, you’d really want to use the opportunity to push your driver’s narrative. That’s just how it goes. Minutes later, Gabi showed up to give Spanger a proper hug and say, “Man, when I grow up, I want to be like you.”

The two men, who had only known each other for a couple of months, burst out laughing.

Still in Bahrain, Bortoleto rushed into Hulkenberg’s room as soon as he heard his session was aborted because a tiny speck of carbon — the byproduct of some good old-fashioned mechanics’ work with an angle grinder — had got into Nico’s eye. Gabi brought his own medical kit to try and rescue his new team-mate, who even failed to attend the first press-conference of the year, so bad the injury was…

It wasn’t Binotto who made the call on hiring Hulkenberg, yet it’s almost the most harmonious driver pairing now. You feel it when you see them patting each other on the shoulder in the media pen after qualifying or races; you even feel it watching Sauber’s silly social media clips, with the constant banter about Hulk being “too old.” You sense it when you talk to people in the team. You could see it in Bortoleto rushing through parc fermé at Silverstone to be the very first to congratulate Hulk on his podium.

Gabriel Bortoleto, Sauber, Mattia Binotto, Sauber

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

Bortoleto is almost too nice a guy – to an extent that you wonder if that’s just a tactic to extract as much knowledge as possible from anyone around the F1 paddock. And that’s not only with Hulk. He’s friends with Max Verstappen, too – and the Dutchman openly says he doesn’t mind sharing not only his sim setups with the youngster, but also some practical F1 advice.

And that’s before mentioning that a key figure for managing his career is the two-time F1 world champion Fernando Alonso, owner of A14 Management.

Bortoleto is in F1 to learn from every interaction with anyone. And boy, he learns fast.

In the last seven qualifying sessions, including the one for the sprint in Spa, Bortoleto has been quicker than Hulkenberg, a driver with the reputation of being one of the fastest over one lap.

It’s also quite telling how the German himself reacts to that fact.

“Has Gabi got the edge on you at the moment, do you feel?” he was asked on Saturday, having qualified P12, while his younger team-mate once again reached Q3.

There are a million ways an F1 driver is supposed to answer a question like that. You’d need to mention the balance, of course, some car characteristics you still need to nail, some “instability” or “weird feeling”. You can say you need to use an “alien” driving style to get the lap time, after all.

Nico Hulkenberg, Sauber

Photo by: Andy Hone / LAT Images via Getty Images

Hulkenberg didn’t need any of that. Perhaps because he’s always been a straight talker, perhaps because he’s not at the stage of his career where he needs excuses. But surely also because he’s not afraid to praise Bortoleto.

“He’s just doing a really good job,” Nico said. “You know, he’s a machine. He produces laps like a printer that never runs out of ink. It’s pretty astonishing, you know, and I think you’ll come to see [more in the future] who he is and how he drives.

“You know, he hardly makes any mistakes for a rookie, and he does and produces the laps very comfortably. So, he’s just doing a really good job, and he’s strong.

“He’s at a steep learning curve, obviously, naturally, like any rookie in the first year. It’s a lot to take in, a lot to process but, yeah, all I can say, he’s one of the future.”

When was the last time you heard an F1 driver talk like that about his team-mate?

Bortoleto’s start of the season wasn’t as spectacular as, for example, Antonelli’s. And he hasn’t yet had a peak like Isack Hadjar’s at Zandvoort. But what’s really impressive about the Brazilian is the trajectory. It’s not only his qualifying pace that keeps improving, he feels more and more at home fighting in the top 10 in the races.

You’d probably still refrain from calling his weekend in Monza a “10 out of 10” — saying he could’ve done a better job by stepping on the brakes just as late as Alonso did on pit entry — but that’s almost the only visible mishap during the Italian GP. The rest was flawless, at least to this observer’s eye.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, Gabriel Bortoleto, Sauber

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

Surely, Mattia Binotto has more insight into how rapid Bortoleto’s development is, but there’s not much more insight needed to see that his decision — one of the first for Binotto himself after he’d been dropped into the struggling team — is already paying off. That Monza weekend must have removed any doubt, had the Italian had any.

Bortoleto’s future trajectory will depend a lot on what Audi’s engine department in Neuburg comes up with next year.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Binotto, if things go Audi’s way, has a potential superstar to build the team around.