How 12 years late, Hulkenberg is finally getting his shot at a ‘big’ F1 team

The name will be the same. 12 years after he left, Nico Hulkenberg is heading back to the Sauber Formula 1 team in 2025. Yet his circumstances are much changed and so are the team’s – and the championship overall from the final days of the V8 engine era.

As the Audi rebrand looms, this is the shot Hulkenberg felt he’d previously been unjustly denied in F1. And it’s one he’s absolutely earned.

Hulkenberg’s move from Haas to Sauber for 2025 has been a while in the making. Only last September, he was openly coveting this exact transfer – recognising that Audi had wanted a German driver when it first formally announced its F1 entry a year earlier.

The manufacturer has also been agitating in the 2025 driver market so turbocharged early by Lewis Hamilton‘s decision to join Ferrari.

This has stirred another famous agitator in the sphere, Red Bull’s motorsport advisor and driver career kingmaker, Helmut Marko. But Audi – via Sauber team representative Alessandro Alunni Bravi – has deliberately positioned itself as “a player in the market” and not a spectator.

It wants its 2026 driver line-up sorted early and has made its offers to reflect that position. Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz reportedly has a lucrative offer to formalise mutual long-term interest in the project, while Hulkenberg has matched Audi’s early intentions in signing sooner.

Given Audi’s status and motorsport pedigree, this is a remarkable career turned around for the driver who in 2021 had been adrift since the year before and sampling IndyCar – a venture he ended up not comfortable in pursuing – in between COVID-19 replacement drives for the Racing Point/Aston Martin squad.

The Audi move provides Hulkenberg with the shot he thought he’d been denied.

Back in 2013, Hulkenberg’s previous F1 season with Sauber featured several stunning performances in Ferrari-powered machinery where his drives at Monza, Korea, Suzuka and Austin were the highlights. In Korea, he thrillingly kept Fernando Alonso and Hamilton at bay.

Then, his 2010 Brazil rookie pole for Williams and his frontrunning drive for Force India at the same track two years later were still fresh memories. In 2013 he was therefore repeatedly linked with a subsequent move to Ferrari and joining Sauber was seen as preparation for such a change.

But it never came – at the Scuderia or elsewhere. The change to the…