Valtteri Bottas has hailed the effect of his Sauber team’s latest upgrades on car performance after qualifying 13th for the Qatar Grand Prix and finishing 12th in the sprint event – but acknowledged the improvement has come rather late for him.
Bottas is out of an F1 race drive next year since all the other seats are filled, and he and Zhou Guanyu are to be replaced by Nico Hulkenberg and current F2 frontrunner Gabriel Bortoleto next season.
“It's very late in the season and we've been waiting for these improvements for a long, long time,” he said.
“So it's kind of ironic [sic], but it is what it is. But at least we can now try and do something and just need to make the most out of it.
“It was quite a strange qualifying actually, every run was different. Balance was a bit a bit everywhere, which was not the case yesterday. So we only made minor changes.
“I don't know what was going on, but still I was aiming to be in top 10, but I think we've got to be happy as a team.”
The embattled Sauber team, now majority-owned by Audi ahead of a rebranding in 2024 and a further investment from the Qatar Investment Authority, is adrift at the bottom of the constructors’ standings having scored no points whatsoever this season.
