F1 | Sauber experiments to find answers to C45’s limitations

Last with zero points, even behind Williams who scored two points during the Monaco Grand Prix weekend. It hasn’t been an easy start to the season for Sauber who, after making a good impression in the very first races of the championship, so much so that they even entered the fight for the points zone on a few occasions, were unable to keep up with their rivals.

Williams has begun a slimming regime for the FW46, while Haas has made progress with the package that debuted in the Chinese Grand Prix. Likewise, Racing Bulls has also grown significantly, while Alpine has made a significant change in the fortunes of the A524 by working on the car’s weak points, including weight and the lack of downforce that were unbalancing the car.

Steps forward that Sauber was unable to counter, leaving it at the bottom of the standings. The hope was to be able to score some points in events with lots of medium or low speed corners, such as Monaco or Montreal, where the C45 tended to show some more quality. However, even in that case the car showed some limitations already highlighted last year, such as excessive sensitivity to bumps in the asphalt or the little margin for attacking the kerbs.

Aspects that, in fact, were already known last year, but that have reappeared this year and that go hand in hand with another major limitation of the single-seater this season, the performance in the fast corners. As with the C44, the fastest corners represent one of the great weak points of the C45, not only because of the lack of aerodynamic load.

“We have definitely seen that with this car, with the package we have now, the high-speed corners are a limitation for us. Also, there is an issue of consistency of the downforce at high speed and that is something we are trying to solve. We will do some tests on Friday to try to solve that,” explained Valtteri Bottas. A program that recalls Ferrari’s at Zandvoort last year, when the Prancing Horse team used free practice to carry out some setup tests to better understand the limitations of the SF-23 in the higher speed corners.

“For us it’s quite clear that in some low and medium speed corners we are actually at the same level as the competition, but the trend still seems to be that at the higher speeds we are lacking a bit of overall downforce. At least we know that it’s an area where we can find some improvements and we are working on that.”

However, the performance at high speed is not the only element that worries Sauber in view of the British Grand Prix, because the C45 has also proven to be quite sensitive to gusts of wind. A characteristic dictated above all by the aerodynamic map of the car but that, on a track like the English one, known for strong winds on certain occasions, could represent a further issue of difficulty by unbalancing the car.

Zhou Guanyu, Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber C44

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“It’s true that this car is quite sensitive. When you get into bumps and kerbs and stop-go corners or high-speed corners with some dips, then we struggle. The car is also quite sensitive to the wind, which is a bit of a worry for this weekend but, at least, we know where to work to improve.”

Silverstone is a track known for its many fast corners but, in reality, there is no shortage of slow sections, such as the “Village” area, or the final chicane, which is why it is important to find a compromise so as not to excessively penalise these areas of the track. Clearly, a team could set up a car to extract the maximum only from the fast corners but, on the other hand, if you have very obvious problems in those areas that push you to compromise, the risk is that of excessively penalising other characteristics, as is happening now in the case of Ferrari with bouncing. Furthermore, there is a second problem: when you set up this car to go and look for the limit in the fast ones, it becomes much more complex to drive.

“It’s definitely not the easiest car to drive. This generation of cars is quite stiff and it’s not easy to manage the bumps and the kerbs, but this car feels very sensitive. We know how to maximise the high-speed performance, but the problem is that you have to make compromises in terms of stiffness, which will affect the slow corners and the kerbs. We have understood a little bit more in terms of setup to extract more performance, but at that point the car is definitely not easy to drive,” added the Finn.