Developments should help Sauber at Silverstone
The British Grand Prix in Silverstone (8th to 10th July) is one of the highlights of the season: fast circuit, enthusiastic crowd, pure racing. Both Sauber F1 Team drivers know and like the circuit, and the Sauber C30-Ferrari will have a few new development parts.
After the team was left empty handed in Valencia, where for the first time this year neither Kamui Kobayashi nor Sergio Pérez made it into the top ten, in England the Sauber F1 Team wants to score points again.
Kamui Kobayashi (car number 16): “Silverstone is a high speed track, so I expect us to be good at the British Grand Prix and in a position to fight for points. For me personally Silverstone is my favourite circuit of all, because I really love such high speed corners and also the crowd is very enthusiastic there. Last year it was there where I achieved my best result of the season when I finished sixth in the race. The weather is always difficult to predict, but it doesn’t worry me after we proved in Canada we can adapt to any track conditions.”
Sergio Pérez (car number 17): “Silverstone is a circuit I have always been good at since my Formula 3 times. I won there twice in F3 and once in GP2. There is a very special atmosphere about this race and I like it a lot. Also I used to live in Oxford, for three years actually, so it was my home race for a while and I still have lots of friends there. It will be something special for me to be there the first time to take part in the British Grand Prix and, of course, I want to do well there. I especially like Copse corner as well as Maggotts, Becketts, Chapel with the quick changes of direction. I also think the circuit should suit our car well.”
James Key, Technical Director: “It’s always good to get back at Silverstone. It’s a great circuit and a favorite for the teams and drivers with its many high speed corners and high lateral g levels. Based on the experience last year, the new layout looks better for overtaking. So it will be interesting to see how the DRS works for Silverstone. We expect that the tyres will be key again this weekend. We have the soft and the hard tyre compound. We have to be careful with the hard tyre, because it does require a lot of warm up, although Silverstone should be as a circuit better depending on ambient conditions. With the soft tyre we are happy, it should be right as an option tyre for this circuit. Silverstone is typically quite heavy on tyres with the amount of loadings they get, and the surface of the track is quite rough and abrasive. For the car we’ve looked a lot in detail at where we seemed to suffer some performance issues particularly during the last two events in qualifying. We have some new directions to take in Silverstone although the track is very different from the last two we’ve been to. We’ll be working closely on the tyres and on the set up of the car in order to extract its full potential on a single qualifying lap. We will have some developments around the diffuser and a new rear wing to test.”
