Finally both cars finished a race, and the first championship point was scored for the Sauber Formula One team when at this afternoon’s Turkish Grand Prix Kamui Kobayashi crossed the line in tenth place overall after defending his position to his teammate in the final laps.

“I am very happy that we finished the race with both cars and got the first point. I had a good start, although I was on the dirty side of the track, and the pace of the car in the beginning was good. Our race strategy was not easy. The car was better on the harder tyre compound, therefore we did a very short first stint on the softer ones. I pitted after ten laps and drove the rest of the race with the same set of tyres. In the end I could see from the car the canvas on the front right tyre. Therefore I started to be very careful, especially in turn 8, and that’s also the reason why I didn’t defend any harder against Adrian Sutil.“

Meanwhile teammate Pedro de la Rosa took the chequered flag right behind him in eleventh place after duelling with the Japanese rookie in the final laps....

“With the high fuel level I had a lot of understeer in the beginning of the race, so I paced myself waiting for my chances to come later in the race. The lighter the car became the better the balance was. The front end came back and I had no problems with the tyres. Certainly I would have been fighting at the end if it hadn’t been my team mate in front of me. Our team needed desperately to bring both cars home and score this point. You have to be careful taking risks and this was not the time to attack and risk losing everything. It is better this point stays with us rather then going somewhere else. We finished this race being competitive and this is very good.“

“Looking at the whole weekend it’s clear we were able to confirm the upward trend which we saw in Barcelona. Of course we were lucky in the race, but we finished with both cars and finally scored a well deserved championship point,” added Peter Sauber, Team Principal.