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Alfa Romeo is set to “change as much as much as we can” on Valtteri Bottas’s Alfa Romeo C42 after a mysterious lack of performance ruined his Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend.
Bottas was only 11th in the Baku race – marking the first time in 2022 that he missed out out on points in a race he finished. Considering Bottas was on a good strategy, starting on hards and taking a cheap pitstop on lap 33 when the virtual safety car was active, with retirements eliminating as many as five quicker cars on top of Yuki Tsunoda’s enforced second pitstop, that’s a poor result.
He suggested something was “fundamentally wrong” with the car given the lack of pace that was the result of a lack of rear grip that manifested itself on Saturday.
Bottas ran without the latest aerodynamic upgrades, introduced in Spain last month, on Friday. This was because of restricted spares and the risk of sustaining damage at a street track like Baku.
The Finn’s struggles were distinct from those that afflicted Alfa Romeo in Monaco, where ride problems held it back. In Baku, the Alfa Romeos were able to run as low as intended, and Bottas said he had no chance of matching team-mate Zhou Guanyu pace, which was in what he described as “another league”.
Before Zhou’s race was ended by a cooling problem that the team said lay on the Sauber, rather than the Ferrari, side, he was on average a second a lap quicker than Bottas. While their strategies and race situations were different, that doesn’t come close to explaining so large a gap.
“I wish I knew,” said Bottas when asked to explain his struggles. “It feels like something was fundamentally wrong because we were so far off the expected laptimes and pace. Even Williams were faster at the end of the race, which is not where our car should be.
“One big thing from Friday to Saturday is that we lost rear-end grip, which is a bit strange because with the car set-up changes, there should have been more grip in the rear end.
“So we need to find out what’s going wrong.”
Alfa Romeo head of trackside engineering Xevi Pujolar said the team saw evidence of problems that first arose on Friday.
But the team has yet to identify the root cause of the problem.
“It seems on Saturday we started to have some question marks on Valtteri’s car, and on Sunday it was clear from our side now that something is wrong, and we need to understand what it is,” said Pujolar.
“At the moment, we don’t know what has gone wrong on that car, but it is clearly on the balance. We can see his feedback that something is not right, but we don’t know what is causing this issue at the moment and we will take some actions just to make sure in Montreal we clear that.”
Pujolar confirmed that not only were the two Alfa Romeos running in the same specification, but also with the same set-up.
With the cars heading to North America for this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix, the team will have limited time to analyse parts – hence Pujolar anticipating as much as possible will be changed to maximise the chances of eliminating the problem.
“Probably what will happen is that we’ll have to change as much as we can to fix the problem, but that’s the limitation we have got in such a quick turnaround,” said Pujolar when asked by The Race about the turnaround time.
“So, we’ll just try to change as much as possible to make sure that we start back with our normal or expected performance and that nothing is wrong affecting the balance.”
