“We expect to be fighting at top of the midfield,” Alfa Romeo fires “warning shots” towards Alpine and McLaren ahead of Silverstone GP
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Alfa Romeo
Alfa Romeo has been hot and cold this season and because of the unpredictable nature of their performances is currently in 6th place behind Alpine and McLaren in the Constructor’s standings.
Alfa Romeo just like its sister team Ferrari has had reliability issues this season and because of this, they haven’t been able to string up good performances on a regular basis.
Moreover, it has been recently revealed that the Hinwil-based team was running older specs on Fridays during past races because of the lack of the availability of spare parts.
Now after 9 races into the season, the team has finally caught up in terms of production of spare parts and has indicated that for the Silverstone Grand Prix they will have the latest specs on both their cars on all three days.
Alfa Romeo’s head of trackside engineering, Xevi Pujolarwhile talking about the current state of things at the team has said, “On Fridays, we still have some problems with reliability, and it is something we are working to get better.”
“But also in terms of performance on Friday, we have been running older packages on Friday. From the next race, we’ll be in a position to run the same package for the entire weekend, so then everything will be easier.”
Alfa Romeo’s engineer of the lack of spare parts this season
Xevi Pujolar believes that the team’s plans were thrown out of the window when they suffered early crashes in the season and as an example pointed to Zhou’s crash at Imola that diverted resources at their factory.
“We had some incidents at the beginning of the season,” he said. “Then you just have to catch up with all the production of spare parts from the packages we’re running, and in parallel having the production of the new packages, which is something that has been the limitation. Now, from Silverstone onwards, we are already in a good position.”
“We were also taking a bit of margin. Tracks like Baku, also Montreal and Monaco, when you are close to the walls, we wanted to make sure that if we have some damage on Friday, we don’t want to pay consequences later on. But now it will be better for the next few races at least.”
“Alfa Romeo has delivered some impressive pace at times this season, and Pujolar says that sights are set on it battling right at the front of the chasing pack behind Red Bull and Ferrari at Silverstone.”
“I think we can expect to be fighting at the top of the midfield, but we need to see,” he explained.
“I don’t know if some teams will bring some [upgrade] packages to Silverstone, but so far I would say that we’ve been pretty consistent at all the tracks – so different types of tracks and different types of aero efficiency as well.”
“For the next couple of races, we expect to be fighting at the top of the midfield with Alpine and McLaren and see if we can get some more points and double points. That’s our target.”
“We are in a position that we want to be in Q3 with both cars, and if that’s the way, then we can fight solid races against Alpine first.”
After looking at what their race engineer has said it seems the team is ready to fight it out in Silverstone and given that they will be operating at their level best, the Alfa Romeo outfit could possibly spring a surprise that would not be good news for teams like McLaren and Alpine.
How do you think the team is going to perform in Silverstone considering they have the super-fast Valtteri Bottas in its ranks.
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Rishabh Negi
(3244 Articles Published)