Valtteri Bottas, a Finnish driver for Sauber, reflects on the team’s poor performance in the opening races of the 2024 Formula 1 season. The underwhelming results have served as a wake-up call for the team, who had hoped to bounce back from a disappointing previous season. Despite making changes to their C44 car, Sauber has struggled to compete and has consistently found themselves towards 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 their struggles to difficulties in getting the tires up to temperature, leading him to make an additional pit stop. The team had anticipated that using the Soft and Hard compound tires would be the best strategy, but they were unable 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 was still unable to make the tires work effectively, leading to a disappointing pace.
Bottas acknowledges that Sauber’s struggles with the current Pirelli tires have also hindered their performance in qualifying. Both Bottas and Zhou were unable to progress from Q1.
“It was evident today that it simply didn’t work. The Soft compounds were much better, so I believe that our car still struggles to generate sufficient energy into the tires,” he stated.
“That’s probably 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 that we couldn’t generate enough heat.”
Bottas admits that Sauber hasn’t achieved the progress they had hoped for with their redesigned car concept, and he urges the team to address other areas of improvement.
A problem with the front-left wheel nut resulted in a pit stop lasting over 50 seconds for Bottas in Bahrain, and Zhou’s charge from the back in Jeddah was also halted by the same issue.
“Of course, it’s only the second race out of 24, and we have some upcoming developments, but we definitely need to enhance not only our pace but also our operational aspects. Both drivers have experienced these issues in the past two races,” he acknowledged.
The former Mercedes driver has revealed that Sauber will have updates for the Australian Grand Prix and believes the break will give the team an opportunity to address their pit stop troubles.
“I think we have some improvements coming for Australia, and now we have two weeks to try and resolve the pit stop problem we have,” 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.”