Peter Sauber
Peter Paul Sauber is a retired Swiss motorsport executive. He was the team principal and owner of various motorsports teams, most visibly the eponymous Sauber Formula One team.
After being trained as an electrician, Sauber became a car salesman in Hinwil, Switzerland. This was Sauber's first real association with automobiles and it proved to be the catalyst for his involvement in motorsports. He competed in hillclimbing events in a Volkswagen Beetle he had purchased,[citation needed] and thus the foundations for his first project as a team owner were laid.
Team Sauber
After opting not to run the family traffic light business, Peter built the Sauber C1 (the C stands for Christiane, the name of his wife) in his parents' basement. It was a car of tubular frame, powered by a 1-litre Ford Cosworth engine. He subsequently drove it to the 1970 Swiss hillclimb championship.[citation needed] It also remained in racing for ten years in the hands of other drivers, notably Friedrich Hürzeler, who took the 1974 crown in the car. In 1971, Sauber handed over the driver's seat to Hans Kunis, who drove the new Sauber C2 model in the same series, as Sauber himself had done so the year before. Sauber had started to gain a portfolio of customers and in 1973, Sauber built three C3 spec chassis for different customers. Designed by Guy Boisson, the car was used predominantly in the Swiss Sports Car Championship.[citation needed]
Formula One
Sauber now began to look seriously at launching an F1 team. In the summer of 1991 Harvey Postlethwaite joined the team to design an F1 car and Mercedes funded a vast new factory at Hinwil. In November 1991 Mercedes decided against direct involvement and so Sauber entered F1 by itself in 1993, with drivers JJ Lehto and Karl Wendlinger powered by engines built by Ilmor but rebadged as Saubers. Sauber did convince Mercedes to enter F1 in 1994 but a year later the German company did a deal with McLaren, leaving Sauber to become the Ford F1 works team. This was followed by a deal with the Malaysian oil company Petronas in 1995 and the establishment of an engineering company called Sauber Petronas Engineering to design and build V10 engines. The company began buying old Ferrari engines and rebadging them as Sauber Petronas V10s but the F1 engine program itself was scrapped in 1998.[citation needed] In the later years of this period Sauber saw increased success with the team finishing fourth in the World Championship in 2001 and fifth in 2002 despite having a much smaller budget than many of its rivals. The team however never scored a race win.
Sauber is married to Christiane (for whom all of his cars are designated "C"). They have two sons: Philipp (born 1971) and Alex (born 1973). Alex began working for the Sauber team in 2010.
