Marcus Ericsson feels it is important to return his Sauber F1 Team to the points in the remaining races of the season in order to jump back ahead of Manor Racing, and is expecting some big steps forward when the Swiss team introduces some of its planned upgrades.
Sauber have struggled so far in 2016, with neither Ericsson or team-mate Felipe Nasr breaking into the top ten, and with Manor scoring a point with Pascal Wehrlein during the Austrian Grand Prix, the team find themselves at the bottom of the championship standings.
But Ericsson is looking forward to seeing how the team perform with its upgrades, which come after the future of Sauber was secured about being taken over by Longbow Finance last month.
“It feels a lot of people on the grid have done their upgrades they had planned already and maybe they have some small steps for the second half,” said Ericsson to Autosport. “That’s what makes me hopeful that we can take bigger steps than other people will do.
“Hopefully for us, we will have some bigger steps with our updates because they are coming later than we expected, and take a bigger jump.
“We need to get back in the points, that’s very important, especially with Manor scoring. So that’s the first target and hopefully we’ll get some new parts on the car that makes us a bit faster and being able to fight for points again.”
