The influx of new recruits aimed at helping the Sauber F1 Team move forward in 2017 had a positive effect on their 2016 performances, according to Team Principal Monisha Kaltenborn.
Following the much-needed investment from Longbow Finance in July, Sauber brought in Xevi Pujolar as head of track engineering, Nicholas Hennel de Beaupreau as head of aerodynamics and Ruth Buscombe as strategy engineer, and Kaltenborn believes that everyone brought in made a positive impact and helped the team improve results and ultimately grab tenth place in the Constructors’ Championship thanks to Felipe Nasr’s ninth place finish in Brazil.
“Through the change of ownership we’ve had a complete new chapter starting,” said Kaltenborn to racer.com. “A lot of it you will hopefully see what effect it will have next year; but instantly we could convince people to come and they could have an immediate effect like on the strategy side, like on the aerodynamic side, like on the track engineering.
“We were not really up to the mark on that before and with these new recruits you can see what a step we took. It is of course all speculation now but who knows, we could maybe have made that point before if we had maybe had that kind of mindset.”
