Xevi Pujolar expands on what has been ailing Sauber Motorsport in F1 2024 where the first part they had one set of issues and currently, it is something else.
It just hasn’t been the F1 season for Sauber as they ready themselves for the transition to Audi. Not just on the management side, but the car and operation side hasn’t worked out as smoothly which has left them with no points so far in the first half of F1 2024.
The first part saw them drop behind due to issues with their pit stops as they found a problem with the machines involved. Even though they had decent pace in qualifying and race, they couldn’t capitalise due to slow pit stops eventually.
Things started to smoothen after they brought an update in Imola which more or less solved their pit issues. But as the season progressed, they started to face multiple other problems which included bouncing and drivers losing confidence.
“I think probably everything has been very close in terms of performance amongst teams,” said Pujolar. “Maybe the performance is not too far away, but we struggled to consolidate with the results. At the beginning of the season, we were a bit better in terms of quali and race performance, but we had some other issues in terms of reliability with the pit stops and some other reliability issues.
“Once we fixed that, then maybe the competitors… It looks like the competitors moved one step further forwards in terms of performance, but everything remains very, very close. We’re struggling more in, say, low- and medium-speed corners. we were about there in the high speed, struggling more towards the top teams but at one point even the midfield seemed to move more performance in the higher-speed corners and then we started to have a bit of issues as well with bouncing, drivers losing a bit of confidence.
“So, working with the car trying to find a configuration that is more suitable for the driving for the confidence and to extract more performance. And that’s the aim of that package that we’ve got with Valtteri as well, to have a bit of a scope to develop for the second part of the season on that section,” summed up Pujolar.
Here’s Valtteri Bottas on current instability at Sauber
Here’s Alessandro Alunni Bravi expanding on Mattia Binotto hire
Here’s Nico Hulkenberg, Sauber drivers on Mattia Binotto
Here’s Audi naming Jonathan Wheatley as team principal
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