Valtteri Bottas, Finnish driver for Sauber, reflects on the team’s poor performance in the opening races of the 2024 Formula 1 season. The disappointing results have served as a wake-up call for the team, which was hoping to bounce back from a disappointing previous season. Despite making changes to their C44 car, Sauber has struggled to compete and consistently found themselves at the back of the grid. In the recent Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, both Bottas and his teammate Zhou Guanyu finished as the last classified cars. Bottas attributes his difficulties to issues with warming up the tires, leading him to make an additional pit stop. The team had hoped that using soft and hard compound tires would be the best strategy, but they failed to generate enough heat in the hard compound, resulting in a loss of performance. Bottas also agrees with Charles Leclerc’s observation that the hard compound tires were too hard for the track. Despite improvements to the car’s setup, Sauber still hasn’t been able to make the tires work effectively, resulting in a disappointing pace.
Bottas acknowledges that Sauber’s struggles with the current Pirelli tires have also hampered their performance in qualifying. Both Bottas and Zhou failed to advance from Q1.
“It was clear today that it simply didn’t work out. The soft compounds were much better, so I believe our car still struggles to generate enough energy in the tires,” he stated.
“Probably that’s why our race pace was decent in Bahrain, as the track surface there is rougher and requires keeping the tires cool.
“However, with tires like these, we felt like we couldn’t generate enough heat.”
Bottas admits that Sauber has not achieved the progress he expected with its redesigned car concept and urges the team to address other areas of improvement.
A problem with the left front wheel nut resulted in a pit stop that lasted over 50 seconds for Bottas in Bahrain, and Zhou’s recovery from the back of the grid in Jeddah was also hampered by the same issue.
“Of course, it’s only the second race out of 24, and we have some future developments, but we definitely need to improve not only our pace, but also our operational aspects. Both drivers have faced these issues in the last two races,” he acknowledged.
The former Mercedes driver revealed that Sauber will have updates for the Australian Grand Prix and believes the break will give the team the opportunity to solve their issues with pit stops.
“I believe we have some improvements coming for Australia, and now we have two weeks to try to fix the problem with pit stops,” he revealed.
“I believe Zhou had the same issue with cross-threading, so it’s something that needs to be fixed because even if we make the car faster, long pit stops are not ideal.”
