Ericsson "surprised" by efficient Sauber upgrades

Marcus Ericsson has admitted that he is quite pleased with how well the Sauber upgrades have been working recently, claiming that the improvements have been "surprising."

Sauber has had quite a solid start to the season, getting the cars into Q2 on a couple of occasions and even more blissfully, claiming four points at the Spanish Grand Prix two weeks ago at the hands of Pascal Wehrlein.

"Honestly the whole weekend in Barcelona, with the pace we had, I was a bit surprised as I didn’t really think we were going to be able to keep that pace for the whole weekend," he said.

"It’s really good for us and we bring that with us here going into this weekend as we believe that if we can be that competitive there we can be at least as competitive here in Monaco, or even more [competitive] as we're bring a lot of updates here.

"We only really brought a rear wing for Barcelona and the rest is coming here. We didn’t expect to be that strong in Barcelona, there were some different reasons, one is that the rear wing worked a bit better than expected.

"The track suited us a bit better than expected as it’s not so engine sensitive, and we found some things with the set-up and with the tyres to get them to work better, especially on the tyre side to control that better, as that’s sensitive for performance. All these different things put together [led to] a big step, but it was quite unexpected to be honest, but in a very good way."

Despite not bagging points himself so far this year, the Swede has a best finish in 2017 of P11. The last time he scored points was at the Italian Grand Prix in 2015, where the 26-year-old took home two points. 

Fergal Walsh