Bottas: It’s “ironic” that Sauber F1 improvement has come so late

Valtteri Bottas has hailed the effect of his Sauber team’s latest upgrades on car performance after qualifying 13th for the Qatar Grand Prix and finishing 12th in the sprint event – but acknowledged the improvement has come rather late for him.

Bottas is out of an F1 race drive next year since all the other seats are filled, and he and Zhou Guanyu are to be replaced by Nico Hulkenberg and current F2 frontrunner Gabriel Bortoleto next season.

“It’s very late in the season and we’ve been waiting for these improvements for a long, long time,” he said.

“So it’s kind of ironic [sic], but it is what it is. But at least we can now try and do something and just need to make the most out of it.

“It was quite a strange qualifying actually, every run was different. Balance was a bit a bit everywhere, which was not the case yesterday. So we only made minor changes.

“I don’t know what was going on, but still I was aiming to be in top 10, but I think we’ve got to be happy as a team.”

The embattled Sauber team, now majority-owned by Audi ahead of a rebranding in 2024 and a further investment from the Qatar Investment Authority, is adrift at the bottom of the constructors’ standings having scored no points whatsoever this season.

During qualifying for grands prix, Bottas has only progressed from Q3 nine times this season, a third of them since the team applied a major update package for the US Grand Prix. He has made it through to Q1 once, in China, where he started 10th but retired with an engine failure. That weekend, where both Sauber drivers got through to Q3 for the sprint race, remains an outlier in terms of qualifying performance. Bottas’s highest finish has been 13th.

After the US GP Sauber introduced another significant update in Las Vegas which will form the basis for next year’s car. A new underfloor geometry, allied to revisions around the front ‘fences’, floor edges and diffuser, is claimed to have improved stability under braking as well as improving overall downforce.

In the FIA documentation in which teams must declare car changes Sauber listed a new front wing profile this weekend, but this is merely a revision of an existing design and the alterations are claimed to target a wider balance range.

“It’s just like a trim,” Bottas confirmed. “I think it’s still purely the diffuser. The floor we had in Vegas is making the difference.

“That just made a step and, on this track, it just seems to help. It’s just all-round downforce, a bit more consistency. As the grid is tight, everything helps.

“I think in theory, it was [an improvement of] three tenths [of a second per lap], which is decent in a tight field.”