27/09/2016
NEWS STORY
Sauber boss Monisha Kaltenborn admits the financial reward is driving her team to leapfrog Manor.
Currently eleventh in the team standings having failed to score a single point, Sauber has just six races in which to overhaul Manor or risk not only equalling its worst season ever (2014) but losing out on many millions in prize money.
"The importance is many millions, it's all I can tell you," she confirmed, according to Motorsport.com. "Of course it would have an impact, but that's something we really don't want to look at, because we think we can still manage it and that's what we are focused on rather than looking at what to do if we don't manage it."
Though the team has made a number of impressive personnel signings since being bought out by Longbow Finance in July, the on-track performances are still far from convincing and the battle to overhaul Manor is not helped by the need to focus on the 2017 car.
Nonetheless, eyeing that precious prize money, the lifeblood of the smaller teams, the Swiss outfit has introduced a number of updates in recent races, though this might, in turn, compromise the team's 2017 programme.
"Some things will take a while. You can't be quicker, that's the way things move," she said. "But I think in terms of development we could do a lot of things when it comes to looking at next year's car.
"We couldn't implement many things on this year's car, but other capabilities are very much there. So we could do that.
"There can be a bit of an effect on that," she admitted, "I'm not saying everything was just going on normally, but it shouldn't give us any reason why we can't make as step ahead next year. Ideally you want to test the parts a bit more, but I think we should be able to overcome and make up for that."
Speaking in Singapore, Kaltenborn admitted that that the recruitment of the likes of Ruth Buscombe as Strategy Engineer, Xevi Pujolar as Head of Track Engineering and Nicolas Hennel de Beaupreau as Head of Aerodynamics, are not the team's final signings.
"There will be some more key people hopefully joining the team, we are talking to a couple of them," she told reporters. "We have suffered a little bit in the last few months with some people leaving or a bit earlier. We gave certain areas we are looking at, it's not going to be just overall through the entire company and we will decide how things develop and how we can also get new partners onboard."