Sauber COO and CTO Mattia Binotto admits that the Swiss organisation “cannot afford” to be at the back of the Formula 1 grid in the build up to Audi’s entry in 2026.
The team currently lies last in the World Championship, having failed to score any points thus far this year.
Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu were at the bottom of the order in qualifying in both the recent Zandvoort and Monza races.
Binotto acknowledged that the team can’t wait for the Audi era before making upwards progress.
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“Certainly not, we cannot afford it,” said the Italian. “I think this is a team that has to become in the future the winning team, and the only way to do that is starting to move up, progressing. We need to train our muscles for the future.
“So yes, I think we need certainly to improve. That’s important for ourselves, that’s important for the team, it’s important for the brand, it’s important for our partners.
“And we cannot somehow accept the current position, but that’s a matter of fact, where we are.
“We need to put effort into improving since the immediate term. We need to balance all the priorities and our efforts from the short to the medium and the long term.
“But I don’t think that our position today is a comfortable one for us at all. It’s very painful, and as I said, we need to train our muscles, and we need to improve because the solid foundations do not come in one day.
“It’s a team that need to do continuous progress each single day, step-by-step, so starting from as soon as possible.”
Meanwhile Binotto says that the powertrain facility in Germany is making progress with the 2026 PU, although he acknowledged that there is much to do.
“I’ve been visiting Neuberg in last days and weeks,” he said. “The engine is progressing well, running at the dyno, some long distances so far already performed.
“But I think here as well, it’s a learning process. We are competing with other organisations where manufacturers are settled down.
“So while I think the organisation there is great, the facilities are great, the programmes are going ahead, still there is a learning curve, which needs to be done. So I’m expecting initially to have a gap to recover. How big it will be, I think that you can never know.
“That only by the time we will be on track that we can only understand. But we’ve got more than a year’s time from now to then.
“There is an intense programme on the dynos in development, and it will be our task to make sure that can enforce it, speeding up as much as we can, but try to be as competitive as we can be at the start of ’26.”
