Valtteri Bottas has admitted that Sauber's performance last week in the Dutch Grand Prix was worse than he had been expecting from the team.
Bottas and his team mate Zhou Guanyu were the final two cars to cross the line on Sunday, and were the only drivers to have gone two laps down on race leader Lando Norris by the chequered flag in the Dutch Grand Prix
That's even worse than the team had been expecting to do at Zandvoort, despite the fact that they are the only team yet to have scored a single championship point in the first 15 races of the season.
"I didn't expect the performance to be this poor," said Bottas, the veteran of 237 Grand Prix race starts who turns 35 today. "This has been arguably our weakest weekend of the season, and the race just confirmed this.
"The start was actually okay," he continued. "We were in a decent place compared to where we started from. But after like five or six laps I saw that I was struggling to follow the pack. That's when I knew that we didn't have the pace.
"I was hoping that maybe with other tyre compounds things could be better, but it never did. We tried all the compounds, so it's not the tyre, it's the car. It just didn't work on this track.
"We haven't been this weak in any of the races this year, and it's not like we made a step backwards, he argued.
"This track really highlighted the weaknesses of the car with the banked corners, with off cambers, cambers, plus the wind, it just highlighted the sensitivity of the car.
"This track is quite unique, and a kind of wind we rarely get," he said. "We're really sensitive to crosswinds and tailwinds. When you're going through bankings and off-cambers and cambers, it's even worse because the ride heights, they are not in the right window.
"The whole car is just too peaky, too much on the edge. It's not really a stable platform and anything that distracts it, like crosswind, just makes things a whole lot worse.
"I'm still optimistic that we can have better weekends and hoping that this was the outlier," he added, looking forward to this weekend's race at the very different Monza circuit. But he's not expecting any magic bullet fix.
"It's long term, I don't think there's a quick fix," he said. "As a team, we need to continue working hard and keep pushing not to lose confidence, as we still have many races ahead."
That's far from ideal given that that his own contract with Sauber expires at the end of the season and, either he or Zhou - or both - will be leaving Hinwil as a result.
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