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Bottas remains optimistic about staying with Sauber

Valtteri Bottas is still waiting a call on his future in the Sauber/Audi Formula 1 team camp, but the Finn remains positive in the face of what he calls an “odd situation.”

Bottas was hoping that a decision on who partners Nico Hulkenberg from 2025 would be taken before this weekend’s US GP.

However team boss Mattia Binotto is still weighing up the pros and cons of either keeping Bottas or taking a young driver, with Gabriel Bortoleto the favourite should the call favour youth.

“I think I mentioned that I was hoping before Austin to be sorted, but I’m still waiting for the final decisions,” said Bottas. “And I think that question is more for Mattia to answer, rather than me. I’ve got the message that there’s nothing I can do at the moment.

“It’s not in my hands. So of course, I’m trying to perform the best I can this week, and hope that will boost things up. But that’s what we are.”

He added: “The situation I’m in now, with only one seat available, of course, that there is a risk. I love F1, and I want to race in F1. So naturally, it’s a bit of an odd situation, but that’s where we are.

“And, yeah, I’ve had lots of time to think about different things, but still, I’m always positive. I will stay positive. And because I really, I feel and believe that I should be in that seat, I feel like I would be best for the interest of the team.

“So that’s why I’m staying positive. And like I said, not much more I can do now, other than performing on the track, and working hard with the team.”

Bottas is hoping that a decision doesn’t take too long.

“Well, one month ago, it was as soon as possible!,” he said. “Of course from my side, eventually there will be a deadline as well, because even then, looking outside of F1, or other roles in F1, soon it’s Christmas, and then when it comes to Christmas, there’s not much availability anywhere. So, yeah, hopefully, soon.

“I am positive. I have been all the time, but until pen hits the paper, you can’t get too confident. But honestly, I’m still positive. So yeah, just a shame that it’s a bit of the wait.

“They obviously have options, but in the end, it’s going to come down to experience versus youth. So they have all the time in the world unless at some point I need to set a hard deadline.”

Bottas insisted that a deal had been agreed in principle should he be chosen, and that there is no longer a discussion about money or contract terms.

“We’ve been in in touch on a weekly basis. And I know the terms that I’m up for, and just basically waiting for the green light.

“I think the terms we’re talking about, they are like they should be, and I think Audi should have the budget. At least that’s the word out there!”

Meanwhile having had the slowest car in the field in recent weeks Sauber has some updates for Austin.

“Actually, a few things,” said Bottas. “We’ve got a new rear suspension, new front wing, I think front suspension fairings. So it’s going to be a busy practice session before the sprint quali, and we’re hoping for an improvement.”

Komatsu hopes that Haas will quickly optimise its update package for Austin

Haas Formula 1 boss Ayao Komatsu stresses that it’s important for the team to make progress with its latest update package from early in the US GP weekend.

All teams are expected to bring upgrades of varying degrees to Austin, and they face the challenge of having only FP1 in which to test them before heading straight into qualifying for the sprint event.

However under the 2024 regs after the sprint and before qualifying for the main race teams have a chance to change set-up and potentially swap between new and old parts.

Komatsu admits that if the updates don’t work as planned straight away the option is there to take them off.

“In Austin we’ve got stuff coming,” he told this writer.  “So we’re focused on just making sure we get on top of that quickly.

“And then if it doesn’t work, we’ve got to be honest with ourselves and roll it back. I hope it works. I think it will work, but there’s no guarantee.

“I’m concentrating on our team, I cannot control if say Alpine is going to be suddenly competitive at one race. Like in Barcelona, we were good, but annoyingly, Alpine was even better than us. You can’t control that.”

Komatsu conceded that the team has the option to run different specs on each car in an attempt to find the optimum.

“We need to finalise the discussion,” he said. “Yes, we can, but whether we want to do that or not is another matter. If we split the cars for a sprint weekend, we get amazing data from the sprint race. So then we can make actually a very good judgment for the main race.”

Komatsu cited the points situation as a good reason to use the sprint as a test session for the Grand Prix, where potentially more is on offer to those outside the top four teams: “We’ve got to assume we cannot score points in the sprint, and in the main race,  you’ve got to assume it’s only one or two points available.

“So I said to my guys three races ago it’s eight races to go, and we’ve got to be scoring one point every race. It’s good that we are there or thereabouts.”

Komatsu is confident that the team has demonstrated that it can improve the VF-24 over a weekend, citing the recent races in Azerbaijan and Singapore as examples of how that was achieved after a difficult start on Friday.

“This FP1, FP2, FP3 thing, it’s always up and down,” he said. “So it’s really trying to focus on chipping away on our side, which I think we’ve done very well in Baku, and I think we’ve done very well in Singapore as well.

“Both races neither driver was happy with the car in FP1, which has got something to say about our lack of ability to put the car competitively straight away. But the reaction from that at both events, I’m really proud of our guys.

“We weren’t very happy, but then FP1 to FP2 we made a very good step considering, because sometimes if you have a knee-jerk reaction, you can be out of sync with track evolution.

“Baku and Singapore, with street circuit evolution always high, and on top of that track temperature difference, five, six degrees, that makes a difference as well.

“So you’ve got to stay calm, and take a mature approach to chip away, so that you are still in sync with track evolution. You can get it wrong so easily. But I’m very happy that we managed to do that correctly.”

Regarding Nico Hulkenberg’s P6 in Singapore qualifying he added: “We improved the car from FP1, and then the drivers, they were better as well, because they didn’t panic from FP1 either. And then in terms of operation, Q1, Q2, Q3, from our plan with track evolution etcetera, it was perfect, and we executed exactly how we needed to execute.

“So after that qualifying session, I was so happy. It was not just the position, P6, it just proved to us that we can put that together – this is what we can achieve.”

Haas boss Komatsu says outscoring RB and Williams is the priority

Haas Formula 1 boss Ayao Komatsu stresses that the team’s “primary objective” in the remaining six race weekends is to outscore championship rivals RB and Williams.

An example of that focus was seen in Singapore, where Haas didn’t react to Fernando Alonso pitting while the Spaniard was battling with Nico Hulkenberg.

By staying out Hulkenberg lost an overall position to the Aston Martin driver. However he also ensured that he ultimately finished in a safe ninth place, while Franco Colapinto and Yuki Tsunoda were out of the points in 11^th and 12^th respectively.

The result meant that Haas cut the gap to sixth-placed RB from five to three points, while extending its advantage over Williams to 15.

“Just to avoid any confusion or unnecessary discussion in real time we just said to ourselves our race is against RB and Williams,” Komatsu told this writer.

“We’ve got to take points away from RB. That’s the primary aim. And secondary is points away from Williams.

“So we thought, are we racing again Alonso? If he tries to undercut us, are we going to do it? Our philosophy was, no. It was good communication and alignment.

“The thing is because of the safety car risk, if we tried to cover Alonso, pit early, and then two laps later the safety car comes, Williams can take points away from us. That was the worst scenario.

“The situation was made simpler by Albon and Tsunoda being out of the equation very early on, so were we only looking at Colapinto.

“We knew that Alonso was pitting. And we knew that if we pit now, he’s going come in between Stroll and Gasly, we’re going to be the same. Do we want to do that? We could have done it, but then again, there’s a safety car risk in Singapore.

“If it was a more normal circuit of course we would have done it. Nothing happened, but in previous years it’s been 100% safety car at some point. So it’s just how to manage that risk, and what’s our primary objective is.

“By not fighting Alonso, we lost two points, yes it’s true. But at least we just made the alignment.”

Komatsu stressed that Haas cannot take anything for granted as a high attrition race could open up the points position for any of the teams outside the big four.

“The thing is you only have to look at the Baku race, where Williams scored 10 points,” said Komatsu.

“And we scored 12 points in Austria. So any of us can score 10-12 points if something happens in front. So for Williams to be 13 points behind us is not comfortable. And they’re quick.

“We cut the gap to RB, we extended the gap to Williams. So now with six races to go we are three points behind RB, 15, ahead of the Williams. So again, in terms of primary objective, that’s achieved.”

Alonso’s eighth place was better than the team’s number crunching predicted

Aston Martin Formula 1 boss Mike Krack says that Fernando Alonso beat the team’s own pre-race simulations by finishing in eighth place in the Singapore GP.

He also stressed that the team shouldn’t get too excited by Alonso’s recent results given that the main opposition is still far ahead.

Alonso started seventh in Singapore, and while he lost places to two Ferraris he passed Nico Hulkenberg’s Haas on strategy to claim eighth.

The result followed a sixth place for the Spaniard in Baku the previous weekend, with Aston the best-placed car behind those of the established top four in both events.

Alonso has frequently suggested that he’s been outperforming the car, and Krack backed up that assertion regarding Singapore.

“I think we are not P8,” said Krack. “Where we are really, we have to look at properly and analyse. But certainly we finished in a better place than we were thinking we would finish.”

Asked by this writer if Alonso continues to surprise him he said: “Yes. At the end of the day we have our numbers, and we do our pre-race estimations. Now in Baku, obviously you finish higher up because there was attrition.

“But [in Singapore] again full transparency, none of our simulations were predicting that we could finish where we finished.

“Now, you could say the predictions are bad. Normally, they work out pretty well.

“We had I think good calls, not getting distracted by others, and very good management in a phase where we had a little bit of a gap, and then this was sufficient to hold on.

“Obviously, if we are very similar, it’s also difficult for others to pass you. But first of all, you have to maintain that position. And we also passed Hulkenberg by strategy.”

Krack stressed that the team can’t draw too much satisfaction from its recent results.

“The worst comment that you can make is we are best of the rest,” he said. “We should not go into full destruction mode now, as a team.

“But we have to be make sure that the positive results that we are accumulating are not hiding from the facts that we have to improve, or that we are not where we wanted to be.

“And that is critical as a whole team, because from outside you see you are scoring, scoring, scoring, scoring.

“But the four teams ahead of us are always scoring more than three or four times the points per race, and that is what where you see at the end of the day.”

Meanwhile Krack suggested a couple of difficult weekends for Lance Stroll at the Baku and Singapore street venues were related to the car.

“I think what is lacking is the confidence,” he said. “We see with Lance if you give him a car that is performing, it’s very, very good. You remember Zandvoort, a monster lap in Q2, when the car gives you confidence.

“But then if you have no confidence, and you have to drive close to the walls, it’s much more difficult. And then it’s up to us to provide the car that gives the confidence.”

Asked if last year’s heavy crash in Singapore was on Stroll’s mind Krack said: “No. We talked about that. He’s pretty cool on these things. He can put these things behind him. We had this discussion pre-Baku, how are we going to approach that.”

Mercedes got it wrong with Hamilton in Singapore

Mercedes Formula 1 team technical director James Allison admits that the strategy deployed on Lewis Hamilton’s car in the Singapore GP was “a clear mistake.”

Hamilton was the only frontrunner to start on the soft rather than medium tyres, with the general idea that they might help him get a better start and possibly challenge Lando Norris and Max Verstappen up ahead.

However he stayed in third place at the start, and also found the softs losing performance earlier than had been predicted. After an early stop he was left with a long run to the flag and an eventual sixth place.

Hamilton made his frustration clear on team radio, while after the race his boss Toto Wolff admitted that it had been a “painful evening” for the Brackley team.

“We shouldn’t have started on the softs,” said Allison. “That was a mistake. If we could turn back time, we would do what those around us did and select the mediums.

“The reasoning was that the soft tyre very often allows you to get away from the start abruptly and allows you a good chance of jumping a place or two in the opening laps of the race.

“We had no real expectation before the race that we were going to suffer the sort of difficulties that we then experienced on the soft rubber. We imagined we would get the upside of the soft rubber, of getting a place or two. We didn’t, because that just isn’t the way the start played out.

“And then we hoped that the downside of the soft being a bit more fragile wouldn’t really play out particularly badly because on the whole, if you look back over the years in Singapore, on the whole the pace starts very, very easy at a Singapore race and the drivers then build up the pace over many, many laps, leaving a soft tyre perfectly okay to run relatively deep into the pit window.

“So we didn’t get the places at the start, the pace started building up from around about lap five and that left Lewis with a car that was not particularly happy anyway, suffering from quite poor tyre degradation and needing to come in early as a consequence and really ruined his race for him. So just a clear mistake.”

Allison admitted that a strong qualifying session in Singapore was an “anomaly”, sandwiched by a poor Friday and a difficult race.

“I think Sunday’s result was pretty difficult for the team and Friday was signalling some of maybe what we might have expected by way of difficulty.

“The anomaly really was Saturday where we managed to get from a difficult Friday to a pretty creditable grid position and there we have to give great credit to the team back at the factory who really did help turn around a difficult Friday, put us much further up the grid than Friday might have suggested and give us a result that while disappointing was not disastrous as a consequence.

“I would say that probably the trade we made, although unwittingly, was that we improved the car for a single lap for qualifying but it was quite a painful thing then on long runs.”

Allison stressed that the W15 doesn’t like hot track temperatures: “We suffered again from a thing that has been problematic for us which is on softer rubber at tracks where tyre temperature is at a premium, where it’s very easy to overheat, we lose relative competitiveness and Singapore is at the extreme end of that experience and it was quite a difficult thing for them to manage.”

He also confirmed that address the temperature issue is one of the key targets of ther coming weeks as the team prepares its Austin upgrade package.

“We’ll be trying to figure out how to mitigate what ailed us this weekend, how to figure out how to make the tyres run better on these sort of overheating circuits, and we’ll be also doing quite a lot of work to bring our last upgrade of the season together.

“We’ve got a fairly substantial set of new clothes for the car coming for Austin that we hope will give us a decent weekend there. So we’ve got to deliver all that and get ourselves ready for these last few races of the year.”