Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber couldn't maximise its potential in the first qualifying session of the year, as Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu bowed out in Q1 for the Bahrain Grand Prix.

In an extremely tight session, Valtteri was 16th and Zhou 17th, the first two cars to miss the cut for a place in Q2.

Alessandro Alunni Bravi, Team Representative: "The first qualifying session of the year is always a moment that gives some reference to the actual performance of the different teams: what we saw tonight is that, once again, the competition around us will be extremely tight, and one tenth can be the difference between making it to Q2 or going out in the first segment. It was disappointing not to have any car progressing: we know we have work to improve our single-lap performance, but we also know that a small gain can put us fighting for much higher positions - two tenths get you close to the top ten. We need to be focused on the work ahead of us, starting from tomorrow, when we need to make the most of our race pace: it's a long season and we will have opportunities to improve the car and make another step towards reaching our targets for this year, all together."

Valtteri Bottas: "It's no secret that we are not where we expected to be today. As a positive, everything worked okay on our car - unfortunately, what we were lacking is a bit of single-lap performance. We already saw from the final practice session, earlier today, that getting past the Q2 threshold was going to be a tough job, as it is really close out there in the field. In terms of setup, we opted to prioritise the race more than qualifying, and hopefully tomorrow we'll get to take advantage of that. We'll be working on finetuning our package overnight, to try and extract something more ahead of the race."

Zhou Guanyu: "Unfortunately, we did not achieve the result we were hoping for today. It has been a tricky and inconsistent weekend for us so far, and we didn't manage to find the optimal setup over the last two days. We knew that we might struggle with our one-lap pace and that making it all the way to Q3 could be difficult, but we expected to be more competitive. While my lap wasn't perfect, extracting another tenth from it would have been challenging. And although this isn't the best start to the season, we need to focus on ourselves and find ways to extract more performance. Now, it's about analysing the data, gaining a better understanding of our package, and taking a step forward in the race and for the upcoming weekends. Tomorrow is a new day, and we'll give it our all to make up for the lost position today."

Check out our Friday gallery from Bahrain here.