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Gabriel Bortoleto looked on course to inflict a heavy defeat on his experienced team mate in the qualifying fight at Sauber as the season passed the two-thirds mark.
When Nico Hulkenberg dropped out in the first round of qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix it left him trailing his rookie team mate 11-6.
Hulkenberg rallied over the remaining races, leaving the score at 12-11 in Bortoleto’s favour, counting sessions where both drivers set times. Counting Brazil against the rookie – as his sprint race crash ruled him out of qualifying for the grand prix – the score is a draw.
But however you interpret that single result, this was still a remarkably impressive performance for a newcomer who had only minimal pre-season testing and no practice outings before his debut. The speed is undoubtedly there in qualifying and he backed it up often enough on race day to score 19 points.
Hulkenberg comfortably out-scored him, and not just due to that windfall podium finish at Silverstone. He impressed by holding Lewis Hamilton off in Spain a few weeks earlier, which wasn’t the last time he out-ran the Ferrari driver.
The 250-race veteran’s form dipped after he finally reached the rostrum for the first time in his career, though he was back on it as the year came to an end. Bortoleto’s last few rounds were rockier: he admitted to finding sprint race weekends on unfamiliar tracks particularly difficult due to the limited amount of practice, and those very circumstances were behind his embarrassingly poor showing at home. Nor did he do himself any favours by braking far too late at the start in Las Vegas.
Just five points finishes may have left Bortoleto last among those who completed a full season, but it would be wrong to write him off on the basis of that. His form compared to his experienced team mate is a more positive and realistic verdict on his potential.
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When did a newcomer last produce such a strong qualifying performance against an experienced team mate? Bortoleto’s result should be seen in the context of Logan Sargeant, who went down 31-0 against Alexander Albon over a year-and-a-half at Williams, or Nyck de Vries’s ejection from AlphaTauri after an 8-2 loss to Yuki Tsunoda.
Mick Schumacher, an F2 champion like Bortoleto, offers a near like-for-like comparison: in his second season of F1 he lost 16-6 to Hulkenberg at Haas. Sauber’s last rookie, Zhou Guanyu, started reasonably well against Valtteri Bottas but deteriorated over three years: losing 14-8, then 16-6, then 19-4.
Bortoleto will obviously want his numbers to trend in the opposite direction. Given how well he performed this year at tracks he already knew, that seems a realistic hope.
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Unrepresentative comparisons omitted. Negative value: Hulkenberg was faster; Positive value: Bortoleto was faster
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