Sauber in the hunt for their first points of the season

(Sauber F1 Team)

The Sauber F1 Team head into tomorrow's Singapore Grand Prix in strong position to score their first points of what has been an extremely difficult season for the Swiss based outfit. Esteban Gutierrez will start the race from 14th place on the grid which may seem a difficult place to start however with the right strategy and a good start absolutely anything can happen. 

Last season, Nico Hulkenberg scored two points for the team after starting the from 11th place on the grid while Adrian Sutil finished the race in 10th place after starting from 15th on the grid. Speaking following today's session Gutierrez commented:

'I am pleased with the outcome of today. In qualifying we were able to extract more than we expected. We made the best out of what we currently have. Tomorrow it will not be an easy race, but at the same time we will keep fighting to extract the maximum out of the car. We will keep working hard and focusing on the race.'

Adrian Sutil will start tomorrow's race from 17th place on the grid. Despite the German's difficult session the Sauber F1 Team certainly appear to heading in the right direction with the C33. Gutierrez did a great job in the final practice session this morning as he finished in 10th place just behind Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen.

Sutil finished this morning's session in 16th place and following this afternoon's qualifying session the German said:

'It is a pity that qualifying was not as good as we expected. But on the other hand, we have had issues with the power unit and the energy management since yesterday. Because of this, we were not able to extract full power during qualifying, which cost me a lot of time on the straights. More than Q1 was unfortunately not possible under these circumstances. We have to get together and find a solution for the race tomorrow.'

Sauber F1 Team principal Monisha Keltenborn praised Gutierrez's improvements throughout the weekend so far saying:

'During the whole weekend we have had issues with the energy management, which didn’t help us at all. However, Esteban was able to constantly improve and showed a good performance. He is in a good position for the race. Adrian could not extract the maximum from the powertrain and was, therefore, handicapped. 

The past has shown that a lot can happen during the race, thus our objective is to keep the contact to the drivers in front of us and be ready for all eventualities.'

The Sauber F1 Team's Head of Track Engineering Giampaolo Dall'Ara commented saying: 

'It was a pitty that Adrian couldn’t make it into Q2. We don’t know yet what exactly happened, but we can see in the data that he was missing some speed on the straights. 

Esteban delivered a solid performance and achieved what was possible today. He made some good progress during FP3 and was able to build on that. Even though the actual positions are not much different from other events before, we are quite satisfied we were able to keep the gap to some of our competitors quite small, which will enable us to race and target a better result tomorrow.'

© Ben Johnston 2014