The Swiss team has struggled with cooling problems all season, which in turn meant it had been forced to run the engine at lower levels to prevent overheating.

But a new cooling system was part of an upgrade package Sauber brought to Hungary and, following Friday practice, Marcus Ericsson believed it has delivered as hoped.

"The big thing is the cooling system," Ericsson told Motorsport.com. "You don't feel [the difference] but the engine guys could see the engine was running in much healthier temperatures.

"[It was] maybe not so much today but for qualifying and the race, we can turn up the engine a lot more. Hopefully we can extract more performance from that, which is something which has been hurting us quite a lot this season.

"The engine has been running quite high and we have to go down on engine settings. We already have the old power unit so you don't want to turn the unit down.

"The way I understand, we can turn it up maximum tomorrow for qualifying, something which we haven't been able to do this year."

Ericsson was pleased with the update package as a whole, but accepted getting out of Q1 will likely still be a challenge.

"It was a good step in the right direction, maybe not as much as we want but it's always like that - you always want more," he said.

"I definitely felt the car, straight away in FP1, was a step forward. There was a bit more grip in general, compared to what I'm used to. The update was working.

"If we can tune the car better to get the tyres better over a whole lap, we should be able to mix it up with guys ahead of us.

"Will it be enough for Q2? I don't know. It might not be possible. I was feeling quite confident in the car today so we could maybe do it."