Sauber pair Charles Leclerc and Marcus Ericsson say the team has to improve its low downforce package, off the back of underwhelming displays in Belgium and Italy.
Sauber had caught the eye through the summer months, regularly scoring points, with Leclerc progressing through to Q3 on three occasions.
Improvements made to Ferrari’s power unit, allied to Sauber’s own gains, led Ericsson to target a double points finish in both Belgium and Italy.
But Sauber scored just one point across both races, courtesy of Ericsson in Belgium, as Leclerc was eliminated at the start at Spa-Francorchamps before taking 11th in Italy, with his team-mate 15th at the high-speed venue.
“There’s definitely something wrong with the package we have brought [to Monza] and this we need to analyse it and understand what was wrong,” he said.
“I think every time we brought something [in terms of updates] it always worked, and sometimes it happens that sometimes it doesn’t and that’s what happened [at Monza].
“So we just need to investigate to know what’s the exact cause of this so it doesn’t happen again.
“Our low downforce package is not very efficient and on this we need to work on.”
Ericsson concurred with his team-mate’s conclusion.
“In general we’ve been a bit slower than expected, we thought we were going to be stronger,” he said.
“But to be fair I think both Spa and at Monza with the lower downforce tracks we’ve been struggling a bit more and I think we all look forward to coming back to Singapore and more high downforce tracks, we were a lot stronger on them prior to the break so hopefully we can get back on form.
“Then of course we need to analyse these two weekends we had now and try and understand why we’ve been lacking, as [in qualifying] we were down the bottom of the speed traps.”
