Nico Hulkenberg admits Sauber are still searching for the ideal set-up after losing the first practice session to the rain at Silverstone. The British weather prevented any dry running in FP1 although the circuit dried for FP2 and the German took his C32 to twelfth place overall.
“We couldn’t really learn much this morning, especially because it is supposed to be dry tomorrow, but here you never know. However that was the same situation for all the teams. The second practice this afternoon was good. We were able to change to dry tyres fairly quickly. Of course, the programme is a bit different without having a proper FP1 and it can get hectic sometimes, but I think we managed to work through the programme quite well. We learned a lot about the tyres and had a good, consistent long run. The set-up of the car can still be improved, but that is normal after losing so much time this morning.”
Teammate Esteban Gutierrez was fifteenth and struggled even more to set his car up, conceding that Hulkenberg had gone in a better direction with his car.
“This morning was a little bit frustrating. It was too wet and we had to wait quite a long time to go out. Tomorrow is supposed to be dry, so it didn’t make sense to run in the wet. Fortunately it was dry in the afternoon and we managed to get a good number of laps on all three tyre compounds and high fuel, so that was positive. We were getting consistent laps and now we need to evaluate the two different set ups we had on the cars. It seems Nico’s configuration was a little bit better on the downforce, especially in the fast corners. So now we need to evaluate the data and make a decision for qualifying tomorrow.”
