Sauber has failed to score a point thus far in 2024
Sauber team representative Alessandro Alunni Bravi admits that the Swiss outfit will struggle to dig itself out of P10 in the World Championship and that the situation is now “semi-critical.”
The future Audi team heads into the Singapore GP yet to score a point this season, while the entrant immediately ahead – Alpine – has 13.
The C45 has regularly been the slowest car on the grid in recent races, and the most recent upgrade package hasn’t made much difference relative to the opposition.
“We are targeting to introduce some developments in the next part of the season, and we will try to anticipate as much as possible,” Alunni Bravi told me.
“We know that for these two races, we can just optimise the package. But of course we need to bring upgrades if we want to do a step.
“The situation in the constructors’ championship for us now is becoming semi-critical, and the possibilities to not finish the championship in P10 are very limited. And of course, if we want to score points, we need to do a big step now.”
Asked if he was concerned about the team not scoring points at all this season Alunni Bravi stressed that the focus was more on the performance of the car.
“I’m not concerned about not scoring points,” he said. “We are concerned to not be able to develop the car and to see a progression this season. Because we know that to have a strong package also next year, we need to improve our performance this year.
“Of course, we have seen developments this year that are a positive, but then our competitors, for the moment, did a better job, and they were able to find more pace also during the season.
“So it’s not a matter of points. The matter is that if we want to become more competitive next year. We need to see progression also this year.
“So the developments that we will bring in the end of the season will be an important sign of the trend that we will have.”
Zhou Guanyu and Valtteri Bottas finished 14th and 16th in Baku, and Alunni Bravi was at least able to draw some positives from the Chinese driver’s performance.
“It’s clear that we struggle to have overall pace a car in qualifying and the race,” he said. “With Valtteri unfortunately we struggled with medium tyres from the very beginning. It was a combination of high fuel and the green track. And were following Tsunoda, and we were unable to overtake him.
“And all these factors, of course, are against our car. It doesn’t suit this kind of conditions. So the pace was not good with Valtteri. The balance of the car was much better on hard than on medium. But we were not in the position to fight for positions close to the points.
“On the positive side, Zhou made a step compared to the previous races, also compared to Friday and Saturday. He was managing the tyres really well at the beginning.
“He was very good, consistent, and he was fighting during all the race, defending, attacking. I’ve seen the Zhou that we want to see, but we know we have a lack of pace.
“This is our main limitation, because in terms of execution, pit stops, I think we were good. But this is now the picture.”