Sauber outlines raft of Barcelona updates

Sauber plans to race with a substantial upgrade to its chassis at the Circuit de Catalunya next weekend, with a brand new aero package, brake duct adjustments and various other minor updates being made to the C30. Technical Director James Key is confident of gaining ‘a good few tenths of a second’ in the process, with the squad currently fighting for the lower points scoring positions.

"Barcelona is familiar to everyone," Key began. "We tested there twice over the winter, but I’m sure in hotter conditions we have to re-evaluate how the tires are working on the track. It’s another circuit which is quite hard on tires, and turn three in particular is hard on the left hand side of the car. It’s going to be a case of looking at tire degradation and durability on Friday, and trying to come to some conclusions.

"Barcelona is a relatively high speed track, so one which should be quite reasonable for our car. After the race performance in Istanbul that could be good for us, but we need to improve our qualifying performance.

"We’ll have a new, quite significant aero package on the car, which will be a completely new front wing, updates to the front and rear brake ducts, new bodywork, new devices around the floor leading edge and under the chassis, and we’ll be testing the new exhaust system again. We’ll also be continuing our work on the mechanical update we had in Istanbul, which proved to be positive.

"So it will be interesting to see how this works. If it works well it should give us a good few tenths of a second improvement in lap time. Our goal is to continue our good.