Bottas addresses 'challenging' year for Kick Sauber as he hopes 'clear direction' can pay off after summer break

Valtteri Bottas still has belief that there are opportunities for Kick Sauber to improve over the rest of the season, despite the team's "challenging" 2024 so far.

Kick Sauber sit at the bottom of the constructors’ standings with 10 races remaining, and are the only team on the grid to have neither driver finish in the top 10 during a Grand Prix, with their best result coming at the season-opener in Bahrain where Zhou Guanyu took P11.

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Since then, the duo have struggled with reliability, restricted upgrades and a lack of pace, producing a string of results that frequently see them finishing races towards the back of the pack.

“It's been a challenging year for us,” the Finn explained. “We still haven't scored a single point which wasn't the target going into the season. We wanted to see an upwards trajectory from last year, and it hasn't happened.

“We started the season with not that easy a car to set up, and even on the pure pace, we were not quite there. We've made some improvement since, but more like baby steps instead of big jumps, unlike some other teams around us.”

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Sauber’s closest rivals in the championship are Williams and Alpine, who are four and 11 points ahead respectively, which should be a gap the Hinwil outfit can close down if they can get their car to challenge for points-scoring places.

Bottas stated that the team “definitely have a clear direction” for the second half of the season, summarising that they simply need to “make [the car] faster” in order to progress.

He added: “A lot of that obviously comes from the wind tunnel and the design office, etc. But yeah, with my performance, I've been happy, and my job for the remainder of the season remains to extract everything I can off the package every single weekend. That's my job.”