A New Year for Sauber
Testing for 2004
By Jamie Makin (04/01/2004)
January 4 2004
With the holiday season now behind us, the Sauber team's preparations for the 2004 season are in high gear. Sauber will have some busy weeks ahead with the launch of their new car as the first item on that agenda.
The C23 will be presented at the Red Bull Hangar-7 in Salzburg, Austria on Monday, January 12. The event will be broadcast live on the internet at 17:30 GMT at www.sauber-petronas.com and www.redbull.com for fans to enjoy. Pop band The Sugarbabes will be performing live at the launch following the unveiling of the new car. Red Bull's driver search winners for 2003 will also be on hand, and the event will celebrate the 10-year partnership between Sauber and Red Bull. This partnership will continue in 2004 despite Red Bull's backing of Christian Klein at Jaguar.
Before the wraps come off the new car though, there has already been a minor setback with it. It has failed the side impact test, which is one of several crash tests required by the FIA. Such failures are not uncommon in the early stages of the development of new cars. The C23 will be reinforced in the problem areas, and a re-test will be conducted later in the month.
This setback will not stop the new car from hitting the racetrack for an intensive testing program this month. The day after the launch, the Sauber team will head to Valencia, Spain for four days of testing with the new C23. Then they will move to Barcelona, Spain on January 20 for a full week of testing where all the other teams except for Minardi will be present. The initial running of the C23 will be a shakedown and check of all the car's systems. It is common for new cars to experience teething problems in their early days. Once any initial problems are overcome, the team will work hard on optimizing the car for the season ahead.
Sauber will, however, still be on a limited budget for their testing program. It now appears the team may not be able to help Bridgestone as much as they would like in tyre testing. "We will be doing more tyre testing if it's possible," Peter Sauber told Autosport, "but that's the problem. We do not have the staff to do a lot of tyre testing." A novel solution is being worked out for this between Sauber and Ferrari. Because Ferrari is Bridgstone's only remaining top level team, they will need to run more testing cars to carry out enough tyre development work to catch their Michelin shod rivals. Both Sauber drivers Massa and Fisichella, who have both made no secret of their desire to race the scarlet cars, will likely be loaned to Ferrari to aid with tyre testing throughout the season when it does not conflict with their testing duties at Sauber.
In the long term, there may be help on the way for Sauber's budget through a newly negotiated extention to the Concorde Agreement for 2008 and beyond. Last month, Bernie Ecclestone resolved the ongoing disagreements with the auto makers who threatened to form the rival breakaway series GPWC. The exact details of the deal have not been revealed, but it is certain that all teams will receive a greater share of the profit made by the sport. This could mean an additional 20 million USD a year for Sauber from 2008 onward, and there are also hints of a one-time lumpsum payment of about 10 million USD coming sometime in the near future.
"All the teams, not only the small ones, need additional money," said Peter Sauber. "At the moment, F1 is a very expensive sport." This is good news for Sauber, who are already the most competitive of the three independent teams.