2024 Formula 1 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix Highlights

 

Kick Sauber F1 Team

 

Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber endured a difficult race in the Jeddah night as the Corniche Circuit hosted the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Coming on the back of a challenging qualifying, the team showed spirit and resilience. Zhou Guanyu ran most of the evening race in tenth and eleventh position – from P20 on the grid. Eventually, a pit-stop issue prevented him from finishing just outside the points, but the pace shown by the Chinese driver was solid with both medium and soft compounds. Valtteri Bottas, starting in P16 on soft, took advantage of an early Safety Car to pit for hard tyres. Still, the compound’s potential failed to materialise and, with no other major incidents to shake up the order, finished in 17th place, one position ahead of his teammate.

After three weeks of testing and racing, the team returns home to prepare for the next championship rounds, starting in Australia on March 24th.

Valtteri Bottas

Overall, it has undoubtedly been a tough race and weekend, where we didn’t have the pace we aimed to unlock from our car. We went for an aggressive strategy with Soft-Hard, but we figured pretty quickly we were struggling quite a lot on the complex compound, never properly getting it to work. We switched to Softs again towards the end, hoping it would make a difference – it did – but unfortunately, we had lost too much time compared to our competitors and couldn’t make much of an improvement. With a week’s break before Australia, we’ll have the time to regroup as a team and analyse what hasn’t worked out. This is just the second race out of twenty-four, but addressing and working hard to solve our issues promptly will be essential. As a positive, we have some updates in the pipeline, hopefully allowing us to step forward and get back into the fight for points.

Zhou Guanyu

This was not my weekend. The race was difficult initially, but we managed to go quite long on the medium compound tyres before pitting for new softs. We would have comfortably finished in P11, but unfortunately, the pit stop compromised my race. We encountered another issue with a cross-threaded nut, which we are investigating as a team. We must understand how this happened and improve to ensure it doesn’t occur again. The positive takeaway from this weekend is that my pace looked quite good, and we’re up there fighting in the midfield, close to the points.

Alessandro Alunni Bravi, Team Representative

Today, we had a disappointing outcome for our race despite the reasonable pace shown by both drivers. Valtteri had a good start, but yellow lights signalling a potential stalling car forced him to brake, losing a few positions. Taking advantage of an early Safety Car and considering his soft compound tyre start, we opted for an early pit stop. Unfortunately, we struggled to find the optimal operating window for the hard compound tyres to perform at their best. A consistent and good performance characterised Zhou’s race. Choosing to keep him out during the Safety Car phase allowed him to fight with Kevin [Magnussen] and Nico [Hülkenberg] for points. Regrettably, we faced an issue during the pit stop: it was similar to last week’s in Bahrain, not the fault of any of our mechanics but something that requires thorough investigation. This setback placed Zhou at the back of the field, yet he persisted, showcasing good pace on the soft compound tyres. We can’t afford minor issues in a highly competitive midfield and must extract 100% of our performance. We’re looking with confidence towards the next race in Melbourne to be fighting for points once again.




There are no comments

Add yours