Wheatley plays down Hulkenberg slump talk: “He’ll string it together”
Nico Hülkenberg’s first Formula 1 podium arrived at Silverstone and blew apart a decade-old storyline in one perfect Sunday. Since then, the points have dried up — and the whispers have started. Sauber boss Jonathan Wheatley isn’t buying the narrative.
After that British Grand Prix high, Hülkenberg’s runs have been more grit than glory. A low-key 16th in Baku, five places behind his rookie teammate Gabriel Bortoleto. A DNS in Italy after a hydraulic issue stopped the car before it even raced. And in the trio of rounds before that, nothing better than 12th. In the same five-race window, Bortoleto quietly banked three points finishes and 14 points, a tidy little haul for a newcomer still learning the trade.
“It’s a question I’m being asked more and more,” Wheatley admitted when pressed on whether Hülkenberg’s hit a dip. He doesn’t see anything structural. If anything, he sees the small margins that define the modern midfield magnified across a few race weekends.
“Nico’s a tremendously experienced, fast racing driver,” Wheatley said. “He’s been out-qualified by a thousandth or a hundredth more than once. It’s not always a big thing.” In other words: don’t mistake a streak of near-misses for a cliff.
The context matters. The midfield is suffocatingly tight. One banker lap in Q1 makes or breaks your Saturday; one messy out-lap or a yellow flag costs you a shot at Q3 and, by extension, points. That’s the world Sauber is living in right now, boxed into a knife fight with the usual suspects where every weekend seems to hinge on a tenth here, a gust of wind there.
Baku was a case study. Hülkenberg looked lively in final practice, enough for Sauber to feel good about qualifying. Then a nudge on the wall left him without a proper baseline for that critical opening run. “If you want to progress through qualifying at the moment, you need to get Run 1 right, in the bank,” Wheatley explained. “Only then can you start chipping away.” Miss that first lap, and you’re chasing track evolution with a car that’s slightly out of step with the circuit. It doesn’t take much to find yourself on row nine.
It’s also worth saying: Bortoleto isn’t just filling a seat. The Brazilian’s acclimatised fast, and at certain tracks he’s looked at home — enough to nick a quali lap here, a points finish there. Wheatley sees it as a positive pressure, not a problem. “Gabriel’s quick. If one of them nails a lap, he’ll out-qualify the other. We’ve also been on a run of circuits Gabriel knows better. With Nico, there’s nothing big to get over. He’ll just put it together.”
The British GP podium — a milestone Hülkenberg carried like a backpack of other people’s jokes for years — erased a psychological weight. The form line afterwards looks patchy, yes, but in the middle of this pack, one clean Saturday often flips a Sunday. Sauber’s job is to turn those almosts back into maybes, and those maybes into points.
Wheatley’s message is essentially to breathe. The ingredients are there: the speed, the experience, the car that can hit the window. When the margins are razor-thin, a blip can look like a spiral. Sauber doesn’t see it that way, and neither does the guy who finally climbed a Formula 1 podium after more than 200 tries.
They’ve ticked that box. Now it’s about making the next one look routine.
