formula143

Grand Prix History in Scale Models

1997, Norberto Fontana, Onyx, Sauber

1997 Sauber C17 Fontana

Sauber C16 designed by Leo Ress and powered by Petronas (re-badged Ferrari) V10 engine, was quite competitive car enabling to score regular points. Sauber No.1 in 1997 was Johnny Herbert, whose season culminated in the team’s third-ever podium finish at the 1997 Hungarian Grand Prix. Johnny finished the season on 10th position in the Driver’s Championship with 15 points. The second seat in the team was initially given to Ferrari test driver Nicola Larini, but he left the team after 5 races being unhappy with the car’s performance. Larini was replaced by Gianni Morbidelli, but when Italian broke his arm, the seat was given to Argentinian rookie Norberto Fontana while Morbidelli recovered. Fontana drove in 4 races for Sauber (his whole career in F1) with lot of adventures (fines, spins, missing red light) and finished best as 9th in Great Britain and Germany.

SeasonSeriesEvent
1997F1WC
Driver No.Entrant
Norberto Fontana17Red Bull Sauber Petronas
Scale ManufacturerCollection
1:43Onyx
Cat. No.QualityRarity
312

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: