In Miami, Valtteri Bottas said the change in race engineer came as a surprise to him. Until the race in China, the Sauber driver was assisted by Alex Chan, an engineer with extensive experience at the Swiss team, who also worked with Kimi Raikkonen.
Normally race engineers are not changed during the season, but team spokesperson Alessando Alunni Bravi explained the reasons: “Andreas Seidl has started implementing changes that will bring the current structure to the one we want to see for the 2026 season. There may be changes at certain points, such as a change of race engineer. Andreas decided to do it immediately.”
The Finnish driver’s new racing engineer is the American Steven Petrik, a graduate of the Ferrari Engineering Academy. At the Scuderia he served as performance engineer for Carlos Sainz’s car and previously worked with Sebastian Vettel.
Petrik has been working at Sauber for several months now; he first tried out the role of Bottas’ racing engineer during the Pirelli tests held at Suzuka a few days after the Japanese Grand Prix. Bottas was informed of the engineer change during a meeting after the Chinese Grand Prix.
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.
