Sauber sued by Adrian Sutil

A warm winter is expected for Sauber. For the second consecutive season the Hinwil team is at the center of a dispute with one of its former drivers. Last year it was Giedo Van der Garde's turn. The Dutch driver won the "arm wrestling" with the Swiss team, forced to pay a whopping 15 million euros. Now, however, it is Adrian Sutil who is complaining about his rights.

According to what we learn from the Swiss newspaper Neue zurcher zeitung, the German driver – with Sauber until 2014 – presented a claim to the Zurich Supreme Court for 3,5 million Swiss francs. The reason? Simple. Sutil wants to leverage the contract that tied him to Sauber until last year, when however - a case similar to that of Van Der Garde - Nasr and Ericsson were preferred to him. And so Sutil was forced to emigrate to Williams, where he occupied the role of third driver.

Sauber made it known that Sutil lost his place due to the poor results obtained in 2014, also tainted by some penalties, as well as having publicly criticized the team. Furthermore, Sutil promised a sponsorship amounting to 40 million sponsor francs, but this amount never reached Hinwil.

In view of the sentence, both parties expressed calm. “The decision concerns only procedural issues“, the comment of the Sauber team principal Monisha Kaltenborn to the newspaper Blick. “I'm calm, I haven't done anything wrong“, the words of Adrian Sutil.

Piero Ladisa

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