Red Bull in pursuit of Williams bolter Franco Colapinto as sharks circle Sergio Perez, Brazilian Gabriel Bortoleto in line to beat Valtteri Bottas to Sauber drive, 2025 driver market, silly season, Liam Lawson

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Formula 1 swings past South America just once per year, but the sport’s forgotten continent is set to play an outsized role in placing the final pieces of the 2025 driver market puzzle.

Just two seats officially remain on the 2025 Formula 1 grid. Sauber, the future Audi team from 2026, holds one of them, having signed only Nico Hülkenberg for the new season.

RB holds the other, where Liam Lawson insists he’s guaranteed to race only until the end of the season.

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There is of course a third driver unofficially up for grabs, with Sergio Pérez’s future at Red Bull deeply uncertain given his sustained lack of performance.

Four incumbents are competing for the remaining seats: Red Bull stablemates Pérez and Lawson as well as Sauber’s Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu.

But two wildcard entries have the potential to blow up the market in the final month of the campaign.

Brazilian Gabriel Bortoleto and Argentine Franco Colapinto are knocking heavily at the door and ready to barge through.

Their signatures will complete the 2025 driver market puzzle.

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COLAPINTO EMERGES AS KEY PLAYER AT RED BULL

There’s a fascinating three-way battle emerging for seats in the Red Bull program.

While Pérez losing his Red Bull Racing drive us increasingly likely after his home-race disaster ensured his team dropped to third in the constructors championship in Mexico City, the knock-on effects of such a decision would be far-reaching for a talent pipeline that isn’t quite ready to flow.

If Lawson moves up, finding his replacement becomes a delicate matter.

Next in line in the talent pipeline is Isack Hadjar, but the hype around the Frenchman hasn’t made him an obvious promotion candidate.

Hadjar had been leading the Formula 2 championship for much of this unusual season in the feeder series, but a failure to score in six of the last seven rounds has dumped him to second behind Bortoleto with two rounds remaining.

His FP1 appearance for Red Bull Racing at the British Grand Prix this year was uneventful but tentative, the young gun understandably not willing to risk Pérez’s car but in exchange not making much of an impression.

It’s left his potential step-up exposed to an unforeseen threat: Franco Colapinto.

Colapinto had been in his maiden F2 season before his Williams call-up at the Italian Grand Prix, having won a sprint race and collected a couple of other podiums.

There was limited expectation on the Argentine, who had no prospect of continuing at the team beyond the end of the year, with Carlos Sainz having already been signed alongside Alex Albon for 2025.

But Colapinto has been a standout performer in his five appearances so far. Five points scored across Azerbaijan and the United States — both at circuits he’d never raced at before — have been key to Williams jumping Alpine for eighth in the constructors championship, a position that will bring the minnow millions in prize money if it holds on.

It’s caught the attention of the paddock, Red Bull included.

Red Bull can uniquely assess the 21-year-old given its understanding of Albon’s abilities. Red Bull highly rated the Thai star, even after dropping him from the senior team at the end of 2020. He was retained in 2021 as a development driver, and his work was integral to keeping the car competitive enough to power Max Verstappen to that year’s drivers title and to developing the competitive 2022 platform that won two consecutive driver-constructor title doubles.

That Colapinto should be showing up so well against him will have only heightened the team’s interest.

“Colapinto is an interesting driver,” Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner told Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport . “He is surprisingly much better for everyone than it was indicated in Formula 2.

“I would be a bad team boss if I didn’t sound out whether he is available.”

Perez not worried about 'idiot' Lawson | 01:16

WILLIAMS WON’T LET HIM GO FOR NOTHING

But there’s a complication for Red Bull. Williams holds Colapinto on a long-term contract and intends to retain him as a reserve and development driver.

Still young and with plenty of scope to improve, he would be an obvious candidate to slot into the team after 2026 should either Albon or Sainz leave Grove.

There’s also a rumour that Sainz, who signed for Williams only after being pushed out of Ferrari and being shut out of the frontrunning teams, has an escape clause at the end of 2025 that could allow him to switch back to a race-winning team.

With the chance Colapinto could be required as soon as 2026, and having taken a punt and discovered he has a gem on his hands, team boss James Vowles is keen to keep his new star on the books, suggesting he would only loan him out rather than grant him free agency.

That’s a deal-breaker for Red Bull, who would want Colapinto under its full control.

With RB returning to its original purpose of blooding youngsters, a drive signed to Faenza would only get the nod as a potential future Red Bull Racing pick, and the senior team would have no interest in a driver still connected to another team.

“The problem with him is that he has a long-term contract with Williams,” Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko, master of the brand’s driver program, told Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung . “[Taking him on loan] is not interesting for any team. You do not want to train a driver for another team.”

It leaves a buyout as an only option.

It would be an unusual move for a brand that’s normally maintained a closed driver ecosystem, and yet it’s emerging as a possible option.

“When we’re into a sensitive negotiation, you don’t give away anything at this stage,” Vowles told Sky Sports when asked if Colapinto could be destined for Red Bull. “I can’t really answer that.”

Liam Lawson flips Perez the bird | 00:28

WHY RED BULL NEEDS HIM

Williams would be entitled to ask for a high price for Colapinto’s contract given his level of performance and general paddock hype around him.

It would be a significant undertaking for Red Bull, which will already likely have to pay out Pérez’s contract and cop a whack via lost sponsorship money from the Mexican’s personal backers.

But it might also find itself having little choice but to pay.

Red Bull faces the prospect of a four-car turnover in the next few years.

Pérez is on the way out. Rumours have abounded all year that Verstappen could seek an escape at the end of next season.

The expiry of Red Bull’s Honda partnership at the end of next year also has many assuming the Yuki Tsunoda’s days at RB are numbered.

That’s a lot of potential vacancies, but at the moment its junior books boast only Hadjar as a potentially F1-ready option, and even then there are doubts about his preparedness to step up.

The need to bolster its ranks is part of the reason Daniel Ricciardo looked like such a convenient option, being potentially ready-made to step into the senior team and buying time for RB to sift through prospective juniors.

But with that plan in tatters, the need to fish from outside the pool for someone like Colapinto is more important than ever.

It’s not as though Red Bull has been afraid to do so in the past.

In fact of its four Formula 1 drivers, only Lawson is a pure product of the Red Bull Junior Team, having been scouted while racing in New Zealand’s Toyota Racing Series in early 2019.

Yuki Tsunoda joined the program in the same year but arrived because he was already a member of the Honda Formula Dream Project, the Japanese brand’s driver development program. When Honda began its partnership with Red Bull in 2019 via AlphaTauri, Tsunoda also became part of the Red Bull program.

Max Verstappen joined the team in late 2014 only after Red Bull offered him a full-time Toro Rosso drive for 2015 to snatch him from Mercedes.

Pérez had no Red Bull connection prior to joining the team in 2021, having started his F1 journey as a Ferrari protégé.

Nyck de Vries before them had been a McLaren junior. While Albon before him had been a Red Bull junior, he’d been dropped from the program previously before being reinstated when the well ran dry at the end of 2019.

Hiring Colapinto would hardly be an exception. It would be more reflective of the rule.

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AUDI ALSO IN THE FRAME, BUT BRAZILIAN BORTOLETO HAS BOTTAS ON THE OUTER

Colapinto also has a crucial second element of value making him a major player in the silly season: marketability.

Argentine interest in Formula 1 has exploded with his inclusion on the grid, so much so that F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali has already talked up the idea of reviving the country’s grand prix, last held in 1998 in Buenos Aires.

The decline of that race preceded a general decline in the connection between South America and Formula 1. The last full-time driver from the continent was Felipe Massa in 2017 — remarkable for a sport once dominated by Brazilians.

From the Red Bull perspective, Colapinto could also be a way to retain its ties to Latin America in a post-Pérez environment as well as tap into South America generally.

Those same commercial benefits would also appeal to Sauber, the future Audi team.

It’s unclear how hard Sauber is pursuing Colapinto, but Vowles has previously suggested two teams are in the mix to get him onto the grid. The Swiss team is the only other squad with availability next year.

Audi is also unlikely to take him on loan, however, and the Sauber operation would be less likely to buy out his contract, particularly if cashed-up Red Bull were bidding up the price.

If not Colapinto, another young South American is heavily tipped for the drive.

Gabriel Bortoleto recently took top spot on the F2 title table from Hadjar. Backed by Fernando Alonso and a protégé of the McLaren junior program, he has no shortage of influential backers singing his praises.

With McLaren’s seats all tied up between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri for the foreseeable future, the team has said it would be willing to release Bortoleto if it got him a full-time drive.

'He f**** serious' - Perez & Lawson rage | 01:07

Sauber already has Hülkenberg tied down as its experienced head to lead the team through its Audi transition, giving it a stable base.

There’s a certain logic to partnering him with a young gun. If the bet pays off, Audi has an instant star to lead it into its competitive era, if not, he can be shuffled off and the team can go back to market.

Either way, the odds are beginning to stack against incumbent Valtteri Bottas.

Bottas had been seeking alternative options earlier this year, including at Williams, with former boss Andreas Seidl having been pursuing a clean break from these chaotic and deeply uncompetitive later seasons of the Sauber team.

His ousting and the ascension of former Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto to the top job revived his hopes of retention.

With all alternative seats having closed since then, all Bottas’s chips are now on Sauber.

He’d sounded confident around the mid-season break that he could get the deal over the line, but the longer he’s been left unconfirmed, the less positive he’s sounded.

“We’ve pretty well agreed everything in terms of the terms and stuff like that,” he told the F1 website. “The ball is in their camp, so I’ll keep waiting and doing my job.”

Rumours emerged at the weekend that he could return to Mercedes in a reserve capacity next year to remain involved in the sport ahead of the next contract cycle, speculation he didn’t deny.

“Firstly, the priority is to stay as a race driver,” he said. “That’s what I want, and that’s what I’m pushing for with Mattia.

“But of course, as I don’t have anything signed — we’re in October — I’ve got to look at all the alternatives, including going back to the Mercedes family. That’s for sure one option, and I would consider it.

“But there’s other options as well, as well as going back to my priority, which is to be a race driver.”

Unfortunately for the 10-time grand prix winner, his fate rests in the hands of a pair of South American bolters.

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