On the final day of testing, Valtteri Bottas was only in the penultimate line of the final protocol, although his teammate, Guanyu Zhou, climbed to third place. But the Finnish Sauber driver was simply unlucky: he was hampered by some technical problems and the fact that on Friday track work during the morning session was interrupted for a long time by red flags, and he managed to drive no more than 28 . rounds.
“If we analyze the overall results of our work in the tests, we get a fairly positive impression,” Valtteri said on the Viaplay television channel. – But the question of pure speed remains open; we don’t have a clear understanding of this yet. The only problem didn’t occur until the last day, but reliability issues are quite typical for testing.”
Bottas also made it clear that the Swiss team will have already made some improvements to the C44 chassis by the first race of the season: “In our sport it is important to constantly look for something new, and the process of refining the car is underway. . Let’s hope we can earn points from the very first race. This is exactly the goal we should set for ourselves.”
The results of three days of work on the Bahrain track were summarized by Sauber Technical Director James Key: “During the tests we were able to learn many new things about the car. We had a very logical approach: like all other teams, we created a list of tasks to be completed, including in the program a lot of problems to be dealt with.
The C44 worked as it should – in three days we completed around 380 laps, and this is proof that the team did a good job at the Hinwil base outside the winter season. Everything seems to be working as we hoped and there were no major surprises. However, the morning session, when Valtteri was driving, was interrupted by red flags and we decided to carry out some checks as a precaution.
However, the team fully completed the entire program and overall we can say that these were three productive days. A solid foundation has been laid to continue preparations for the first race of the season. Of course, there is no point in analyzing the round results, as each team had its own priorities, but next week we will of course have a better idea of the balance of forces.”
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
