In the thirteenth stage of the season in Hungary, the Sauber team could not open the scoring with deserved points: Valtteri Bottas finished sixteenth and Guanyu Zhou nineteenth. The team admitted that the car still lacks speed over a long distance.
Valtteri Bottas (16th): “There wasn’t enough action on the track to take advantage of it. At some points I was unlucky with blue flags. This made me lose time, but the main reason for this result was the lack of race pace. Today we didn’t have the speed to finish in the top ten on our own. Nothing happened in the middle of the peloton, so I couldn’t gain any positions.
The start of the race was good, but when the situation stabilized we couldn’t keep up the pace of RB. I made the first pit stop quite late to gain an advantage with the tires closer to the finish, but it’s not easy to overtake on this circuit, even if you have an advantage with the tires.
“This weekend, however, we looked better than in the previous two stages. The car updates helped here and will help in Spa, so we need to keep moving in that direction. The team is making progress, but we need to keep working and putting all the pieces together to take another step forward.”
Guanyu Zhou (19th): “This weekend has shown that we have made a step in the right direction in terms of one-lap speed, but the same cannot be said about long-lap speed.
Today my race was ruined after the first pit stop. The early stop was meant to protect Valtteri from his rivals, but it didn’t go as planned. As a result, I had to save tires, so I spent the race alone and didn’t participate in any events.
The new features on Valtteri’s car showed that we had made progress, but we still had problems with pace on full tanks, which meant there was no chance of scoring points.
The biggest challenge for the team now is to stay focused and motivated. We will have to get a better understanding of what is new when it arrives on both machines after the summer break. Then we can start again, close the gap and become more competitive.”
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.
