Bottas Delivers Honest Verdict After First Ride In Stake's 2024 Challenger

Wednesday, 21 February 2024 at 15:45

Sauber / Stake driver Valtteri Bottas shared his feelings after the first ride in C44 during the first day of pre-season testing in Bahrain.

During the morning session of the pre-season testing at Bahrain Internation Circuit, we saw ten drivers (one from each F1 team) on track.

Valtteri Bottas was the first of Sauber's drivers to test the new C44, and he shared his first impressions of the car with the media in the paddock after his run.

"Better than the C43, that's immediately clear, which is good, and which is something we predicted, at least with the correlation to the simulator, which is what we've been predicting. It more or less feels like it should."

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It is always great for teams to see as high correlation to the simulator as possible. But the Finnish driver warned the crucial part will be the comparison to their other nine teams on the grid.

"So definitely improvements have been made over the winter with this new car, and that's good to see, but then the real question is how much the others have improved. That's something we will see next week."

In the morning session of the first day of pre-season testing in Bahrain, Bottas ranked seventh out of the ten drivers on track with a time of almost two seconds slower than the fastest Max Verstappen. However, he asserted that lap times are not the focus of his team at this moment.

"The next days, we'll be getting a bit more towards fine-tuning and finding more and more performance. Today is not the day to focus on lap time."

Nevertheless, the 34-year-old said he can already feel a great step forward in terms of how his car feels, which is great news for all the Sauber fans. He added:

"But we have made a good step forward, which is good to feel, good to see, but we still need to discover more because on the first day, you start conservatively with the setup, with the ride heights and everything. We haven't been chasing performance, it's more about learning."