Source: twitter.com/MarcusEricsson

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Ericsson: The best six laps of the past two years!

Ericsson: "The best six laps of the past two years!"

28-03-2018 16:20
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Jake Williams-Smith

The Swede only managed to complete 6 laps in the first race of the season, but he believes Sauber showed a lot of promise in Melbourne.

Marcus Ericsson hailed his brief race in Australia as one of the best weekends the Sauber team has had in years. Ericsson managed to qualify in 17th place, one position ahead of his teammate Charles Leclerc, with a car many believed to be the worst package on the grid.

Although he retired on lap 6 of the Grand Prix with a loss of power steering, Ericsson was confident the team could have gone on to have a strong race with the car they had.

“Probably the best six laps of the past two years!” he said. “I was fighting, I was racing, I was faster than the Williams… I had a good start, I was attacking cars around me and it has been a while since we have been in that sort of position so that was lots of fun and very promising.

“It’s just a shame that it ended so quickly. It’s definitely frustrating, but that’s how it goes sometimes, there’s not much we can do. But it was a promising few laps.

“We worked hard overnight after Friday, we were really frustrated and disappointed where we were on Friday and both here at the track and back at the factory, they worked really hard to try and understand and analyse why.

“We made some changes on the car – quite a few changes – to turn the car around a bit and it really helped a lot with our performance. It was a different car almost to drive on Saturday. Straight away in FP3, in the changeable conditions, we were straight away a lot more competitive than on Friday and then that followed up in qualifying.

“In qualifying, I think without Gasly as traffic in the middle sector we would have been in Q2, so I think we really had a good car over the rest of the weekend which is very promising going forward into the next few races.”

He may have not finished the race but his rookie teammate managed to finish 13th in his first Formula One race with one of the better performances of the race. Leclerc's strong result may be the platform Sauber need to push on this season and set the team up well for the Bahrain Grand Prix in just over a weeks time.