Felipe Nasr says he was “sad” to see Sauber miss out on points during last weekend’s British Grand Prix, especially as mixed weather conditions “could have opened up more opportunities”.
Having qualified a lowly 16th at Silverstone, the Brazilian rookie failed to take the start of the race after his Ferrari-powered C34 was sidelined with a gearbox issue on the formation lap.
Team-mate Marcus Ericsson initially drove a steady race and was running in the bottom half of the top 10 before falling foul of a wrong strategy when rain hit the circuit, which left Nasr contemplating what might have been.
“I am sad, not only because I had a failure on the car, but also to see that it was a race we could have scored or at least sneaked a point in,” said the GP2 graduate.
“First of all, at the start you could see that a few cars were off already. They were out of the race so you could have capitalised on that. And then later in the race, these mixed conditions could have opened up a bit more opportunities to score points.
“The team was running for points but somehow they lost it out on the number of stops, but I don’t know what happened there.”
Nasr was all the more frustrated considering that scoring opportunities have come fewer in number since F1 returned to Europe in early May.
While both Sauber drivers finished in the top 10 in Australia and China, the Swiss outfit has only picked up a couple of points since then, courtesy of Nasr’s strong drive to ninth at Monte Carlo. The 22-year-old now pins hopes on the upcoming evolutions his squad has in the pipeline.
“We know how difficult this already is, we’re on the edge of things. Only with the upgrades that are coming are we going to be able to put ourselves back together and close the gap to the midfield.
“We have to wait for sure, without that we cannot expect a miracle from our side. I know in Spa we’ll get the engine update from Ferrari and further ahead we have a bigger upgrade coming, so I’m looking forward to that. I feel that if we can make that package work, we can put ourselves back in the fight.”
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