Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber had a busy Saturday at the Circuit of the Americas, as the team competed in both the Sprint race and qualifying for tomorrow's United States Grand Prix. It was a challenging day for the team, with Zhou Guanyu and Valtteri Bottas finishing the shorter, earlier Sprint race in 19th and 20th position respectively; in the grid-setting session later in the day, Valtteri was 18th and Zhou 20th.

Tomorrow's race will be difficult but, as seen today, COTA is a circuit that promotes action and there will be opportunities to make up some ground over the duration of the event.

Alessandro Alunni Bravi, Team Representative: "Today, in both the sprint race and qualifying, we were unable to improve our overall performance enough to stay closer to our direct competitors. While we saw a small improvement with the new front wing on Valtteri's car, the gap in laptime, though marginal, represents a significant performance gap. Our drivers struggled in sector one and the high-speed corners, which is a characteristic of our car that we are working to improve. We are still investigating a brake issue on the rear axle of Valtteri's car during the Sprint race. For tomorrow, we can only focus on fighting lap by lap to show our strong determination to improve the current situation."

Valtteri Bottas: "First of all, I want to thank the mechanics who worked really hard to get the car ready in time for qualifying. We experienced an issue with the brakes in the final laps of the Sprint, and fixing that kept the crew busy, so to be even in the session was an achievement. Qualifying was challenging, as we worked to maximise the learnings from the sprint race. We made some positive setup changes that seem to have brought us closer to the competition in terms of single-lap performance. I'm feeling optimistic that these setup improvements will translate to better race pace tomorrow compared to what we saw today. Overall, it's been an important learning experience, and I'm hopeful we can build on these learnings to deliver a stronger performance tomorrow."

Zhou Guanyu: "Today's sprint race was quite a clean race for me, but we still don't have the pace needed to be closer in the mix. The qualifying session was difficult, but it's reassuring to see that, even without the updates, we were able to get closer to the rest of field in terms of lap time, and Q2 was not as far off as in previous events. While it has not been an easy weekend so far, Austin is a track I have always felt comfortable, and we'll keep up the effort. It's a long race tomorrow and we will give all we have to make some progress."

Check out our Saturday gallery from COTA here.