Sauber lacks performance on hard tyres
Sauber's Adrian Sutil and Esteban Gutiérrez were able to make up positions during the start of the British Grand Prix in Silverstone, coming into 11th (Sutil) and 12th (Gutiérrez) until Esteban’s race was over on lap ten due to an accident. Sutil's performance degraded throughout the race with tyre issues, resulting in a 13th placed finish.
Esteban Gutiérrez, car #21, Sauber C33-Ferrari (Chassis 01/Ferrari): “I had a good race start. After the restart I was fighting with Pastor (Maldonado). When I tried to overtake him in turn 16 he braked and did not leave me enough space. I was already beside him and could not avoid a collision with him. I feel very sorry for the team, as this is not the way a race should end. However, we have to look forward to the next races.”
Adrian Sutil, car #99, Sauber C33-Ferrari (Chassis 04/Ferrari): “The race was relatively unspectacular for me. It took a few laps to overtake Jules (Bianchi), but afterwards I was able to constantly improve my lap times. We decided to go with a one-stop strategy. After the pit stop I could not get the hard tyres to work and was not fast enough anymore. Unfortunately I was rarely able to attack and had to defend most of the time.”
Monisha Kaltenborn, Team Principal: “The team worked well during the weekend. In qualifying, which took place in changing weather conditions, everything was done right, however, we were not able to exploit our full potential. In the race it was obvious what our problem was. We were not able to make the hard tyres work properly. In the first part of the race our lap times were competitive. We will now have two days of testing in Silverstone this week, and we will work on further improving the competitiveness of the C33.”
Giampaolo Dall’Ara, Head of Track Engineering: “Both our drivers made good starts and were able to gain positions. After the re-start we lost time behind a slower car before we were able to overtake. From this moment on the performance was quite good, and it looked as if we were able to match the performance of some of our competitors. But then we lost Esteban’s car due to an incident. With Adrian we changed to the hard compound. From this moment on we lost competitiveness, because we were not able to make theses tyres work, which had an immediate influence on our performance and cost us a couple of positions. Overall, we were not fast enough to make it into the points.”
Esteban Gutierrez was also handed a 3-place grid penalty for the German Grand Prix, having been deemed guilty for causing the collision with Maldonado that also ended his own race.
