Sauber driver Valtteri Bottas said the team’s improvement on the new car is “immediately clear” in comparison to previous year’s C43.
The team now runs under a new public sponsorship name -Stake F1 Team- but officially remains as Sauber.
Bottas said his squad had predicted a significant improvement on this year’s iteration of the car following testing in the simulator.
“[The new car is] better than the C43, that’s immediately clear’ which is good, and which is something we had predicted, at least with the correlation to the simulator, which is what we’ve been predicting,” Bottas told the media after his morning stint.
“Improvements have been made over the winter with this new car and that’s good to see, but the real question is how much the others have improved. That’s something we will see next week.”
The Finnish driver said the team will spend the remaining of pre-season “fine-tuning and finding more and more performance,” and said lap times are not representative of the full potential of the cars on track.
“We have made a good step forward, which is good to feel, good to see, but we still have to discover more.
“We haven’t been chasing performance [today], it’s more about learning.”
“The two biggest changes are high-speed load and stability, which have been lacking the last two years, and also drag,” Bottas said. “I immediately felt the car was a bit less draggy, which was an issue for us last year.”
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