Kamui Kobayashi - Photo Credit: Sauber Motorsport AG
Sauber will be hoping for rain during tomorrow’s Brazilian Grand Prix as another tricky qualifying session today leaves Kamui Kobayashi and Sergio Perez starting from sixteenth and seventeenth on the Interlagos grid.
“Overall, the weekend here is a bit tricky for us,” said Kobayashi. “We worked on improving the car's balance in every practice session and it got better, but it wasn't a big enough step to find the proper grip to be able to attack. I was really fighting on every lap. It was tight to get into Q2 because already in Q1 it was difficult to warm up the tyres. However, tomorrow a lot will depend on the weather conditions and we will see what we can do.”
The team go into tomorrow’s race trying to defend seventh position in the constructors’ championship from Toro Rosso, who are just one point behind. Perez notes that, after the qualifying result today, Sauber have not made this task easy for themselves.
“It was a disappointing qualifying with the outcome that the Toro Rosso cars, our direct competitors, are in front of us,” said the Mexican. “The main problem for me was that the car was so inconsistent: every lap was different, and I couldn't get temperature into the tyres. However, we will not give up. If we get mixed weather conditions tomorrow, anything can happen.”
Giampaolo Dall'Ara, Head of Track Engineering at Sauber, had no excuses for today’s result – the cars were just not fast enough. “This is obviously not the result we wanted, but it looks as if this was the limit today,” he said. “In the end, both our drivers were at the same level. We had a trouble-free session, but the performance just didn't allow us to finish higher up on the grid. For tomorrow there is a high chance of rain, and we will definitely be ready to make up ground in the race.”
