“It’s not consistent enough,” Valtteri Bottas critical of Alfa Romeo’s performance
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Valtteri Bottas
Valtteri Bottas joined Alfa Romeo from Mercedes this season, after spending 5 seasons at the Silver Arrows. In Alfa Romeo, he is indisputably the number one driver and has used this experience to help Alfa Romeo become a better version of themselves. And without a doubt, Alfa Romeo have been much better this year, but it hasn’t all been amazing.
Alfa Romeo’s season has been rather up and down. Both drivers finished in the points in the first race of the season, with Valtteri Bottas up in 6th, and Zhou Guanyu in 10th, but sometimes, the car has not performed as well as they would expect or like it to. A multitude of reliability issues has definitely not helped.
Alfa Romeo have 8 retirements (2 of them are classified finishes), with Zhou Guanyu retiring 5 times, while Bottas has retired thrice, including his retirement in the last race in Hungary. 6 of them were mechanical retirements, with some being due to power unit issues. It is important to mention that Alfa Romeo uses a Ferrari power unit, who have suffered from reliability issues as well, as has their other customer team, Haas.
Valtteri Bottas: “There’s still much room for improvement,”
Reliability has often evaded Alfa Romeo, and is currently their biggest issue. Despite looking much better than they did last year, there is certainly much room for improvement, and Valtteri Bottas agrees with this sentiment. As reported by Motorsport Week, Valtteri Bottas thinks that Alfa Romeo can do better.
Bottas said: “For sure we’re lacking in reliability. In terms of pace, we were a bit better this weekend than in the previous races, so that’s positive but yes, we do need to finish the races.”
He added: “It would have been an even greater shame [in Hungary] if we were about to score points again and we had the issue. So, high focus on reliability first and then on performance as well.”
Alfa Romeo have not scored any points for the fourth race in a row, with Bottas suffering two retirements, and Zhou Guanyu having to retire once in France. Bottas thinks that performance-wise, the team deserved better, but issues let them down.
“I think we had a strong pace [in Hungary], and we deserved a little more, as in terms of performances we seemed to be back to where we were around Silverstone. I learned a lot so far this season, it’s been both tough and enjoyable, and there’s still much room for improvement.”
Alfa Romeo will be looking to get back on track in Belgium following the season break, after what has been a very disappointing spell of races for them.
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Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)