2024 Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix Highlights

Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber fought hard in the 2024 Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix but unfortunately had no points to show for its effort. Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu delivered solid races but struggles in race trim meant they couldn’t fight for a place in the top ten. Still, the team is improving with the car updates, showing their worth and an uptick in one-lap pace.

With one race left before the summer break, the team will head to Belgium to continue progressing and fight back into the mix for points.

Valtteri Bottas

Ultimately, there wasn’t enough action around us to make anything out of this race. Sometimes, we got a bit unlucky with the timing of the blue flags and lost some time, but the main issue was still the lack of race pace. We don’t have enough to make it into the top ten on merit, and today, with the straightforward race we had in the midfield, we couldn’t go anywhere. The race had started ok, but once it stabilised, we couldn’t keep up with the RBs: we left our first stop quite late to have a tyre advantage at the end, but, as always, it’s not easy to make progress even when you have a tyre advantage. Still, it’s been a better performance this weekend than in the last couple of events: the upgrades helped us and will do so in Spa, so we need to keep progressing in this direction. The team is improving, but we must keep pushing to take another step forward.

Zhou Guanyu

This weekend has shown that our one-lap pace moved in the right direction; however, we don’t see the same in race pace. Today, my race was compromised after the first stop: the early pit stop was to cover our rivals and protect Valtteri, but it didn’t work out as planned. It meant I had to manage my tyres, resulting in a lonely and uneventful race. While the new upgrade package on Valtteri’s car indicates progress, we still struggle with high fuel loads, and neither of us could reach the points. Our most enormous task now is to stay focused and motivated as a team: we need to understand and learn more about the upgrade package when we both have it after the summer break so we can start afresh, close the gap, and become more competitive.

Alessandro Alunni Bravi, Team Representative

Today’s race has been tricky for us: unfortunately, we had confirmation that our race pace and consistency across different tyre compounds are insufficient to fight for the points. We knew this from Friday when the race simulations showed that we had more degradation and lacked pace compared to our direct competitors. Today’s race was just not as good as we wanted, although we tried to differentiate the strategies of our drivers, pitting Zhou earlier to create gaps for Valtteri potentially. After the positives we saw in qualifying, thanks to the new updates, there is still performance in race trim, especially in dirty air. We saw Valtteri do some overtaking manoeuvres on Ricciardo at the beginning of the race and on Sargeant and Ocon at the end when he finally ended up chasing Magnussen. It didn’t change our result, but we saw we could fight with our rivals on track. It was hard for Zhou: we chose to pit him earlier to cover Magnussen, Ocon, Alonso and Ricciardo: we knew the second and third stints would be hard for him, but in the end, the pace wasn’t there for him either. On a positive note, all four pit stops today have been consistent and fast: it is a testament to the hard work done by our people and mechanics here at the track and design office in Hinwil to fix the issues we had earlier in the season. With this spirit, which shows we can react and improve with the work of everyone in the team, we need to look forward to the next races. There is still a lot of work ahead of us, but it’s work that will pay dividends not just after the break but also in 2025.

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