Sunday: Sauber drinks the cup to the last drop

Kamui Kobayashi – 15th:

« My start was OK, except that I couldn’t gain any positions. When I was fighting with Sebastien Buemi, our two cars touched and the front wing was damaged. I switched to super soft tires after 10 laps, having started on soft tires.

When the safety car was deployed, we lost the advantage of fresher tires as everyone was changing tires. I also had some damage to the rear wing, but I’m not really sure where it came from.

Around mid-race, Bruno Senna was behind me and pushing extremely hard, and that’s when my front wing got damaged. Because of that, my car was understeering a lot and the tires were blistering. I then had to pit earlier than expected to replace the wing.

After this second stop, I was able to overtake a few cars at the back of the pack, but there was obviously no chance of scoring points today, we were just too slow, but we will work on it.

Sergio Perez – 16th:

My start was quite good but then I got stuck behind cars and the positions I had gained were lost. At the beginning, with the soft tires, it was quite good, and then I struggled with the super-softs. During my last stint, in particular, they degraded much too quickly. I had to pit and change them three laps before the end because the front right tire had a hole and you could see the structure.

It’s a shame but it wasn’t possible to finish the race with these tires. However, we didn’t have the pace today to finish in the points.

Giampaolo Dall’Ara, Head of Track Engineering:

« In qualifying, we already had issues with our pace and today it wasn’t any better. We hoped to solve the problems we had during practice in terms of grip, but we weren’t really able to improve the situation.

We of course had some incidents, but our main problem was really the lack of performance as we were slower than the competition.

We tried to find solutions with the strategy, the drivers did a good job, but in the end, we weren’t good enough. Now we need to react quickly.