Miami Grand Prix – Friday Report

Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber had a difficult day at the Miami International Autodrome, as the team battled challenging conditions in the Sprint Qualifying session. Zhou Guanyu and Valtteri Bottas set the 17^th and 18^th fastest times of the session, a result that will make scoring points in tomorrow morning’s Sprint race a tall order: however, the learnings from today’s sessions will be put to good use in tomorrow afternoon’s Qualifying session for Sunday’s Grand Prix.

Alessandro Alunni Bravi, Team Representative: “There are no excuses for today: when you finish 17^th and 18^th, it is clear that we have missed something in terms of preparation and execution. We could see from the morning that we needed to improve our car’s balance, especially in the low-speed corners, but we weren’t able to make a sufficient step forward to fight for SQ2. We didn’t have the cleanest laps, and traffic also contributed to a performance that is disappointing, and that we feel doesn’t correspond to our true potential here. We keep working to improve – our car, our performance, our operations: our focus, rather than on the Sprint, is on qualifying, where we want to put both cars in Q2 and see what we can achieve. Nothing is compromised yet: it was a bitter test today, but the weekend is still long. We need to work hard tonight, analyse everything and improve every single aspect of our performance.”

Valtteri Bottas (car number 77):
Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber C44 (Chassis 02/Ferrari)
FP1: 17^th / 1:29.636 (23 laps)
SQ1: 18^th / 1:29.360 (7 laps)

“Today has been a rather challenging day in the office. We made big changes in terms of balance after the practice session, and the car felt quite different; there has been somewhat of a track reset as well, and it felt like we were missing some grip. On top of that, we unfortunately got caught in traffic during my push lap. I went off track after a close encounter with a McLaren, and the tyres never really recovered their temperature after that. Tomorrow’s starting positions for the Sprint are definitely not ideal; there is still a lot we can learn about the car, though, and as it’s still early in the weekend, we can try and turn this around for Sunday’s main event.”

Zhou Guanyu (car number 24):
Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber C44 (Chassis 01/Ferrari)
FP1: 15^th / 1:29.445 (24 laps)

SQ1: 17^th / 1:29.267 (6 laps)

“Unfortunately, today didn’t go as we expected. We weren’t happy with where we were this morning during FP1 and, although we managed to address some of these issues, we couldn’t get the balance of the car right for qualifying. I struggled quite a bit to find grip, which made it difficult to make it out of SQ1. We will investigate the root cause of this: tomorrow’s Sprint race is actually an opportunity for us to learn more about our race pace, and I am positive that we can have a reset before Qualifying and take a step forward with our performance.”