First double finish for Sauber
Finally both cars finished a race, and the first championship point was scored. At the Turkish Grand Prix Kamui Kobayashi came in tenth, and Pedro de la Rosa took the chequered flag right behind his team mate in 11th.
Kamui Kobayashi: 10th C29.01 / Ferrari 056 “I am very happy that we finished the race with both cars and got the first point. I had a good start, although I was on the dirty side of the track, and the pace of the car in the beginning was good. Our race strategy was not easy. The car was better on the harder tyre compound, therefore we did a very short first stint on the softer ones. I pitted after ten laps and drove the rest of the race with the same set of tyres. In the end I could see from the car the canvas on the front right tyre. Therefore I started to be very careful, especially in turn 8, and that’s also the reason why I didn’t defend any harder against Adrian Sutil.“
Pedro de la Rosa: 11th C29.03 / Ferrari 056 “With the high fuel level I had a lot of understeer in the beginning of the race, so I paced myself waiting for my chances to come later in the race. The lighter the car became the better the balance was. The front end came back and I had no problems with the tyres. Certainly I would have been fighting at the end if it hadn’t been my team mate in front of me. Our team needed desperately to bring both cars home and score this point. You have to be careful taking risks and this was not the time to attack and risk losing everything. It is better this point stays with us rather then going somewhere else. We finished this race being competitive and this is very good.“
Peter Sauber, Team Principal: “Looking at the whole weekend it’s clear we were able to confirm the upward trend which we saw in Barcelona. Of course we were lucky in the race, but we finished with both cars and finally scored a well deserved championship point.”
James Key, Technical Director: “I’m very pleased we scored a point at this event. It was also good that we had a two car finish. It was fairly eventful in many ways, because, to begin with, it was a case of making sure we were matching the top ten pace, which Kamui did superbly well. He stayed very close behind Fernando Alonso. On the strategy side of things, we decided to bring the cars in early, and particularly Kamui given his tyres were several laps old after doing Q3 with a used set of tyres. That seemed to be the right call. Unfortunately he was held up slightly at his pit stop, which cost him two seconds. Without that he could have been further ahead. Towards the end Kamui’s tyres went off quite badly at the front, and he lost quite a lot of lap time, which allowed Pedro and some other cars to catch him up. But the fact is both came home in tenth and 11th. I think this is deserved by everyone and we should be very pleased with this result.”
