F1 | Bottas remains concerned about the new Alfa Romeo's reliability
Finland’s Valtteri Bottas has expressed concern about the Alfa Romeo C42’s ability to complete a full race distance after several technical issues hampered the Swiss team’s preparations for the new season. Nevertheless, Bottas is pleased with the speed and the feel of the new car.
Valtteri Bottas is concerned about the reliability of his Alfa Romeo after a string of problems caused the team’s testing programme to be disrupted.
Alfa Romeo’s pre-season has been dogged by reliability woes for both Bottas and Guanyu Zhou, with both drivers having their running cut by several technical issues which have consigned the car to the garage.
But the car has proven to be quick when it’s been pushed as Bottas finished the final day of testing sixth-fastest despite having to end his programme of running early with a gearbox issue, whilst Zhou finished the day 11th overall.
The reliability issues have become a source of concern for Bottas, who said that his biggest worry at present was doing a race distance when he spoke to Motorsport.com.
“I’ll be more confident once we speak with the team next week, and when I hear that all the issues, we understand 100%, and we make sure that they don’t happen again.”
“Because at the moment, my kind of biggest concern is doing a race distance because we’ve had multiple different kinds of issues during this test. We’ve been able to fix them, and we just hope there’s no new issues coming up.”
Whilst finishing the opening race might be a tough task, Bottas is undoubtedly happy with the speed of the C42 and the feel of the new car, which he says has been massively improved since the opening test in Barcelona.
“In terms of performance, my feeling, for now, is that the team has made a clear step from last year’s [car], and that’s nice to see much better than Barcelona. And also, now at least I finally got a proper feel of the car. Today, especially in the first half of the afternoon, I did some really solid long runs and not a bad feeling.”
“I was really starting to like the car, both high fuel and a little bit lower fuel. It felt pretty decent. Of course, I would have liked to have more laps, but I’m ready. But we need to make sure we learn from the mistakes and issues. That’s the number one thing; as I said, we will have (a) few practice sessions to fine-tune the balance next week.”
