Gearbox gremlins hamper Ericsson's day

(Sauber F1 Team)

The Sauber F1 Team endured a difficult day on Saturday at the Barcelona Circuit de Catalunya in Spain.

Marcus Ericsson suffered a gearbox problem in the C34 and as a result of this was unable to complete a full programme of running for the Hinwil based outfit. However the Swedish driver did manage to complete 53 laps with a fastest time of 1m 26.340s which was the fourth fastest time of the day. Speaking at the end of the day Ericsson stated:

‘It was not an easy day for us. With the gearbox issue from yesterday, we missed almost the whole morning session. In the afternoon we were struggeling a bit to understand the car. We were changing different things, but we could not get the car to work as we wanted. However, we managed to do some laps, and it is also important to learn from these sort of days. We will go through the data and make sure we take a step forward for the next days.'

Felipe Nasr will conclude the test for the Hinwil based outfit tomorrow. Speaking about today’s action the Sauber F1 Team’s Head of Track Engineering Giampaolo Dall’Ara stated:

‘We had a late start as a consequence of some work we carried over through the night from yesterday. In the afternoon we were able to recover on the programme side and were chasing the weather to some extent. We had pretty variable conditions and it was also colder than the previous days. However, we were able to put together more set-up checks, functionality tests and measurements.'

© Ben Johnston 2015