The comeback that wouldn't say its name.

Peter Sauber built his first racing car in 1970, in his parents' garage in Zurich. He called it the C1 — C for his wife, Christiane — and the letter has fronted every Sauber since. Hillclimbs and Swiss championships followed, then customer cars, then a small workshop in Hinwil, east of the city.

By 1982 the little firm had graduated to Group C, the World Sportscar Championship's new top class, on BMW power it could barely afford. Ninth overall at Le Mans in 1983 landed the team in Porsche's own advertising: the winners had taken the other nine places in the top ten, and the ad ran under the words Nobody's perfect.

The turn came through aerodynamics. Hunting for a wind tunnel, Sauber asked Stuttgart University and was refused — its ties to Porsche ran too deep — until a sympathetic professor pointed him towards Mercedes instead. The company's tunnel came with something better than clean air: ambitious young engineers, among them Leo Ress, who laid out the suspension of the Sauber C6 and would in time become the team's chief designer.

When the BMW straight-six had given all it had, Sauber went looking through the Mercedes road-car range for a replacement — and found the M117, the all-alloy five-litre V8 from the S-Class, which he reckoned would be ideal for Group C's fuel-limited formula with a pair of turbochargers on it.

On 12 January 1988 the board made it official: a works team, Team Sauber Mercedes, with full factory backing — one half of a twin programme that also sent the 190 E 2.3-16 into the DTM touring car series, where AMG was building its own reputation race by race.

The 1988 cars wore the dark colours of AEG, a Daimler subsidiary, and won first time out at Jerez with Jean-Louis Schlesser, Jochen Mass and Mauro Baldi sharing the driving. Five wins followed, though not the title — Jaguar's numbers told over a long season — and the speed was no longer in question.

Then came Le Mans. On the Wednesday of practice, Klaus Niedzwiedz was through the kink before Mulsanne corner at about 360 km/h when his left-rear Michelin exploded. He somehow held the fishtailing car out of the barriers and brought it back to the pits trailing shredded bodywork. Testing at Monza had already produced two failures like it, and nobody — not the team, not Michelin — could say for certain why.

For a company that had never stopped carrying the memory of 1955, that settled it. The statement was short: “In the light of the unique character of the Le Mans event, we have decided not to enter this year's race.” Both cars were packed up before the race had even started — a dignified embarrassment that set the agenda for everything 1989 would have to put right.

Its successor dropped Sauber from the badge. The 1990 car was called Mercedes-Benz C11, the first competition car so named since 1955, and under the skin a carbon-fibre monocoque finally replaced the aluminium tub Leo Ress had drawn in 1982. The results barely changed: eight wins from nine rounds, a second consecutive teams' title with more than double Jaguar's points, and the drivers' crown shared on equal points by Schlesser and Mauro Baldi.

The second car became a classroom. Jochen Neerpasch had a Formula 1 project in mind and quietly signed three young men to grow into it: Michael Schumacher, Karl Wendlinger and Heinz-Harald Frentzen. They took turns alongside Jochen Mass, who was there not to teach them speed — they had that — but how to behave inside a works team. Wendlinger won at Spa, Schumacher won the Mexico City finale at twenty-one, and Frentzen, second at Donington, left early to chase single-seaters.

Then the rules changed. For 1991 the championship demanded 3.5-litre naturally aspirated engines — Formula 1 in all but name — and Mercedes answered with the C291 and its purpose-built M291 flat-twelve. It was clever and it was late: down on power against the Cosworth-engined Jaguars and plagued by oil-system trouble, while the old C11, carrying 100 kg of penalty ballast, kept scoring the actual points.

The team had so little faith in the new car lasting a day and a night that it sent three C11s to Le Mans instead. Two died there of the same absurd wound: an alternator bracket, anodised “to make it look nicer”, had turned brittle and broke. The junior crew of Schumacher, Wendlinger and Fritz Kreutzpointner brought the survivor home fifth. In October the C291 finally held together long enough for Schumacher and Wendlinger to win at Autopolis in Japan — and a month later, on 28 November 1991, Mercedes announced it was withdrawing from racing altogether.