Following the winter break and testing in Bahrain, Stake F1 Kick Sauber Team is set to start the 2025 F1 season in Melbourne, the Australian Grand Prix. During the media session held on Thursday, Nico Hülkenberg talked about the struggles, limitations and potential performance of his new car.
Realistic approach towards struggles
When the German driver was asked what he expected in terms of where he might end up performance-wise at the weekend, he gave a rather realistic answer and explained why they will struggle with the car this weekend.
After analysing the data from the Bahrain testing, it was evident that the Kick Sauber 2025 F1 season challenger would create some struggles for the drivers. Hülkenberg concluded that these statistical limitations “doesn’t look good,” for this weekend. The team identified a few problems with the car during and after testing and tried to fix them. However, Hülkenberg accepted there are also new issues with the car they need to address.
“I think Bahrain, the car was challenging to drive. It wasn’t easy.
“I think we’ve identified a few things that weren’t optimal with the car there. So, obviously we tried to clean those up.
“There’s a few other new bits and bobs on the car. So, kind of reset and then go again and see how she, you know, how the car feels at all.”
Inconsistency is the main limitation of the car
The Kick Sauber driver was posed the question of the car’s main limitation, which he answered the inconsistency. As the Kick Sauber F1 team, inconsistency challenged them the most in F1 2025 season testing.
“I think it was not really just one balanced trend. It was just a little bit inconsistency, I think that we were struggling with mostly in Bahrain.”
Hülkenberg mentioned the team is working hard in building a relationship and understanding how everything functions. With the first race of the 2025 F1 season, he expressed that this relationship has intensified in the Kick Sauber.
“He’s working every day in the background.
“Yeah, but now, obviously it will intensify the whole working relationship as things get real race weekends, under pressure, all these situations for the first time.
“But, so far so good.”
Hülkenberg stated that everyone on the team is doing their best to solve the inconsistency problems. He added that their work is only a beginning to hopefully collaboration of many years.
“Obviously, we’re all and even both of us, pushing. And it’s the start of, hopefully, many years together.”
Not in its ideal optimal aero configuration
The German driver accepted that though Bahrain was a difficult track that was windy during the testing days, the 2025 F1 Kick Sauber car still possessed problems which needed to be fixed without losing any further time. Hülkenberg elaborated that the car had aero configuration issues and was not in its ideal form.
Coming to Melbourne after the data gathered in testing and the efforts of overcoming the aero configuration problems, Hülkenberg said that it was important to how much they changed so far.
“Bahrain is always a tough track for that and it was obviously very windy on all the days.
“But like I said, I think the car was not in its optimal window in terms of the aero configuration.
“So we need to see how much we changed it coming here now.”
