Sauber achieves enormous improvement with fastest pit stop at Baku

Having struggled for a consistent performance during their pit stops at the start of the season, Kick Sauber have made great inroads recently, having completed the quickest pit stop at last Sunday’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

The 2024 season got off to a disastrous start for Kick Sauber, but after 17 races, this team has managed to transform its fortunes by executing the DHL Fastest Pit Stop after being the worst outfit in the pits.

After delivering pit stops that were well below par last year, Kick Sauber decided to give it their all over the winter, introducing new equipment and different training routines. They had high hopes for the start of the season in Bahrain, but under race conditions, they found errors that had not surfaced during the dummy runs. New parts were found to be defective. Wheel nuts and wheel hubs failed to marry together perfectly, resulting in errors that proved to be catastrophic.

Valtteri Bottas stopped for 52.44 seconds in Bahrain while in Jeddah, Zhou Guanyu was stationary for 28.71 seconds. In Australia, Bottas was caught out first, posting a time of 31.18 seconds, then Zhou had to suffer the ignominy of a 20.20-second stop.

The first batch of emergency updates was meant to prevent these disastrous stops, but change didn’t come about quickly. Up until then, the crew had performed 22 stops that took more than 3.5 seconds, which is considered to be a ‘fail’, whereas by comparison, eight of the teams had made fewer than ten stops taking more than 3.5 seconds and Ferrari only one.

The Hinwil-based squad introduced a major technical update for Imola with new nuts and hubs. Things have greatly improved since then and the crew has finally been able to implement the changes from the winter, appearing regularly in the top ten in every race following on from the summer break.

Sauber has finally delivered a very strong performance at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, servicing Valtteri Bottas’ car in just 2.32 seconds to perform the quickest tyre change of the 51-lap race.

With a score of 88 points in the overall standings of the DHL Fastest Pit Stop Award, Kick Sauber may have now taken seventh place from Aston Martin, but there is still a lot of work to be done in other areas – in the constructors’ world championship, for example, they are still in last place with zero points.