Pit stop drama at Stake F1: What's going on?

Despite the fact that the Stake F1 team's car is not fast, we have yet to see the true performance. In fact, the team suffers from very slow pit stops. Alessandro Alunni Bravi explained why in Australia.

Ahead of taking over from Audi in 2026, Sauber's team this season is called the Stake F1 team. Like when it was still called Alfa Romeo, the team finds themselves towards the back of the field. The team has not yet managed to score points this season, partly due to incredibly slow pit stops.

Valtteri Bottas' stop in Bahrain, for instance, took more than 52 seconds. This way, of course, you will never succeed in scoring points in a race. Even the team representative Alessandro Alunni Bravi, realises this. "I think that we didn't materialise all the potential of the car in the first two races because we had two problems at the pit stop with both cars, with Valtteri during the first race in Bahrain, where it was possible to fight for points. The same happened with Zhou in Jeddah."

Ahead of the Australian Grand Prix, Bravi was still optimistic. The team has done a lot to fix the slow pit stops. "We redesigned all the components from the hub, nuts, everything, in order to improve our pit stop and we also changed the equipment. So we found that there is an issue with the design of a part and we are redesigning the part but of course this takes time also for the production and everything." Still, the problems have not been fixed yet, as Bottas had another slow stop in Australia.