For Alfa Romeo there was once again nothing to gain from the Formula 1 race in France. While Guanyu Zhou retired prematurely with a technical defect, Valtteri Bottas ended up far outside the points in 14th place. Thus, the racing team had to leave without points for the fourth time in the past five races.
Bottas could have spent his time doing something else today: “I could have sat in the sauna for an hour and a half and had just as many points,” he says angrily. “All the sweat for nothing. But of course we always learn something,” he tries to draw at least a little something positive from the day.
Alfa Romeo simply lacked pace at Le Castellet on Sunday, and he was also a little unlucky with his strategy. Because the safety car triggered by Charles Leclerc after 18 laps did not help him. Bottas had started on the hard tires and couldn’t benefit from them.
Hard tires don’t perform well with the car
Although the Finn came into the pits “because I had to make the stop because otherwise you’d lose too much time here in the pit lane”, he drove out again with hard tires because he didn’t survive the rest of the race on a softer set would have. But it was also clear that he would have to come to change tires a second time.
“It would have been nice if we stayed out late with the Hard and then just tried a stop on Medium,” he says. “But the timing just wasn’t great for the people on Hard.” And the hard tire didn’t perform well with the car.
But what also didn’t work in France was once again the start. However, this time it wasn’t the usual fault of the clutch, which Ferrari had improved before the weekend. “This time it was wheelspin,” says Bottas. “We don’t know why.”
“Some teams have definitely made more progress than us”
So disillusionment remains once again, because not much is left of Alfa Romeo’s initial performance. At least, apart from Aston Martin, no direct competitor in the World Championship was able to catch up points – and even at Aston Martin it was only a single point. But the opponents who are ahead of the Swiss in the World Cup are slowly moving away.
“We now see that some teams have definitely made more progress than we have,” says Bottas and sees that it is slowly becoming difficult to fight against McLaren and Alpine. “They have made good steps, hopefully they won’t bring much more.”
Alfa Romeo itself will again have a few new parts for the upcoming race in Budapest, which Bottas says is “very, very necessary”. “And hopefully we can keep pushing and get some more parts towards the end because, for example, Williams had better pace than us today. And that was definitely not the case a few races ago.”