Alfa Romeo came to the Red Bull Ring determined to fight for the Top 10.
The weekend, complicated by the sprint race, proved unsuccessful for the team.
For Zhou Guanyu, qualifying ended early, in 17th position, and he remained below 16th for the rest of the weekend, up until the race.
The Chinese driver spoke of the lack of progress throughout the course of the weekend, which left the team “not competitive enough” to score points.
“I feel like that’s kinda where we are, at this weekend. Unfortunatelly not competitive enough, as we wanted, fighting for top 10. I don’t think much will change in a race. There’s plenty of work to be done, coming ahead for the next few weeks.”
The driver of car number 24, in fact, finished the race in 12th position, without actually having been a challenge in the com.
His team mate, Valtteri Bottas, experienced perhaps no better luck. After a qualifying session that saw him ending 14th, the Finnish driver navigated towards the tail of the field positions for the rest of the weekend, finishing the race 15th after front wing damage when he ran over debris left by Yuki Tsunoda’s AlphaTauri.
“Everything became quite tricky, I had some damage on the front wing on the first corner of the race and I lost so much ground on the first stint. And that compromise the day quite a lot.”
The upgrades made by the team up to this weekend have marked steps forward for both drivers, but not enough to keep the team consistently in the points zone. Zhou Guanyu spoke about the efficiency that allowed him to finish 9th in Barcelona, but failed to do so in Austria, where he was unable to reach Q2 in qualifying.
Photo Credit: Alfa Romeo F1 Team Stake
Valtteri Bottas, just before the weekend, mentioned balance as the car’s stronger point.
“The biggest asset I would say is how it behaves. The balance overall is quite nice, that way in the race it’s actually quite good for the tyres. And also recently it feels like we’ve been able to predict setups pretty well, so we’ve only had to do minor changes in the race weekend.”
Silverstone is a crucial round for the team, and they plan to push forward with a number of changes that should potentially address the weaknesses experienced by the drivers, such as high-speed cornering and the performance in qualifying.
Bottas discussed the car’s critical issues ahead of the weekend, explaining:
“And weaknesses, still obviously high-speed corners are not our strength, definitely. And the upgrade we have for Silverstone is actually improving the high-speed performance without any losses.”l
“We need better qualifyings. I think that’s been in the recent events the weakness, just not getting things right. I think ultimately, the performance has been better than what the quali results have shown. So we just need to get clean sessions and do the right calls and so on. So I think that will already help us a lot in the race.”
Updates never seem to come fast enough for teams in F1. With Silverstone ahead, both drivers expressed concern about their position relative to the competition.
Zhou explained:
“Compared to a lot of the bigger teams they obviously can bring multiple upgrades. If one doesn’t work and for us, we have to kind of stick to what we’ve got, before we planned the season. Of course, we’re trying our hardest but it’s not easy, and let’s say it’s been a few more difficult weekends for the team.
“Everyone is obviously bringing upgrades and we’re talking about not even tenths or one hundredths, we’re talking about thousandths. I missed Q2 two times over like 0.006s in total over two laps.”
And Bottas added:
“We definitely need it. It seems like some teams made some steps this weekend, and we didn’t obviously bring anything new. It’s such fine margins that you’re then just on the back foot, so we definitely need those upgrades and even more than that soon.”
Photo Credit: Alfa Romeo F1 Team Stake
