Monisha Kaltenborn says the mood at Sauber remains optimistic because it knows where it will improve given the finances to do so.

Sauber has suffered a difficult start to the season, with staff receiving wages late on a number of occasions while the team itself has yet to score a point. However, speaking exclusively to F1i, team principal Kaltenborn says there would be a lot more concern if the team did not know what needs addressing to return to competitiveness.

"I think one thing is we can take the negative with the performance because we are not there where we should be and where we want to be, but we know the reasons for it," Kaltenborn said. "So the positives are that the reasons are something that we can work on and resolve this points.

"Important is we have a certain stability in the team. Even if some people have left, the core team is very much still the same as it was before. So that has not got much disruption in there, we have been able to adjust to the changes which are there and the teams are focused on getting out of all these issues.

"I think it would be worse if you had, for example, the financial means and still weren’t delivering because you don’t know what you’re doing wrong there. In our case we know what we can still do but we just have to make sure that we have the tools for it, particularly the financial tools.”

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