Peter Sauber praises team for 2010 recovery

Peter Sauber paid tribute to his team after they rebounded from a difficult first half of the season.

	Nick Heidfeld	Kamui Kobayashi
Qualifying position	14	12
Qualifying time comparison (Q2)	1’41.113 (+0.33)	1’40.783
Race position	11	14
Laps	55/55	55/55
Pit stops	1	1

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Nick Heidfeld

Passed Robert Kubica at the start but lost the place again avoiding the Schumacher/Liuzzi crash.

An early pit stop allowed him to take places off Rubens Barrichello, Kobayashi and Adrian Sutil.

He ended the race trying to pass the Ferrari of Felipe Massa for the final point.

Kamui Kobayashi

Qualified 12th but was unhappy with changes made to his brakes:

Since we changed the brake material for free practice three, which is routine, I have had problems. The brake balance between front and rear isn’t right. This obviously results in a lack of confidence and makes it difficult to put three perfect sector times together.
Kamui Kobayashi

Spent several laps trying to pass Barrichello but couldn’t find a way through. Delayed his pit stop until lap 33 trying to get an advantage in the pits but couldn’t pull out enough of a gap, losing time being passed by Robert Kubica and Lewis Hamilton.

After his pit stop he was back behind Barrichello again and, to make matters worse, Sutil jumped ahead of him as well:

I am disappointed with the result, as I definitely wanted to score in the final race of the season. I did what I could, but there was no way to overtake.
My car was okay, but we had bad luck with our strategy. It didn’t work out with some cars stopping early when the Safety Car was out after the accident. I had a good start gaining two positions, but later I could never go at my full pace, as I was always stuck.
Kamui Kobayashi

Compare Kamui Kobayashi’s form against his team mate in 2010

Team principal Peter Sauber said he was happy with the team’s progress after a difficult start to the season:

First of all congratulations to Red Bull and Sebastian (Vettel) who drove an excellent race today and deserved to win the title.
Unfortunately, we finished the final race of the season outside the points. Both drivers did a very good job.
Nick was able to keep the Williams and the Force India behind him. Kamui was unfortunate to get stuck behind Rubens Barrichello for almost the whole race.
This was the end of a very challenging season for us. We had a very bad start. After eight races we had just a single championship point because the car wasn’t fast enough and, even more importantly, not reliable, which was very unusual for our team.
We finished the season with 44 points. This is certainly not satisfying for us, but it was not possible to make up for the losses from the earlier races. Nevertheless there are also positive aspects to review:
Since James Key joined us we have significantly improved on the technical side. Furthermore Kamui has shown a great development during the season, so I am very happy he drives for our team.
I want to thank the entire team for their efforts, which goes for the people at the race track as well as for those in Hinwil, and especially for our drivers Kamui, Nick and Pedro.
Peter Sauber

2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

Browse all 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix articles

6 comments on “Peter Sauber praises team for 2010 recovery”

BasCB
15th November 2010, 15:31

You have to agree with Peter Sauber. This was the season everyone expected Brawn to have last year, before they started winning the first race.

The team was nowhere with their aerodynamics and the technical side was largely compromised and hampered by the Ferrari engine being hard to tend to. But after the first few races Sauber definitely turned the team into a groove and they started mixing it in for the points.

Great drives from Kamui, Nick Heidfeld impressed me again, he got into the car and got along driving it from the first lap. Good job on Pedro for getting them a solid foundation to build from, even it if he was not the best driver to race it (his qualifying was pretty solid).

demos12
15th November 2010, 18:30
I think that this was not like the brawn season everyone expected. Whilst no-one expected Brawn to win instantly, they were working on the 2009 car way before they were told they were pulling out. Sauber was told they were pulling out way before they had started on the 2010 car, so it would have been very difficult for them to challenge the likes of force india and williams – and when they did beat them, they were quite good at it.