Bottas endured a frustrating weekend in Baku after his pace completely faded from Saturday. In the race, he was a seated duck, finishing with a lap of 11, while his teammate Zhou Guanyu went to the points until he retired due to a technical problem.
On Friday, Bottas finished one tenth ahead of Zhou in each training session. After switching to the new Alpha specs on Saturday morning, the Finn was suddenly seven tenths slower than the Chinese debutant in FP3 and Q1, and six tenths behind in Q2 as the pair went classify 14th and 15th.
Bottas said he could not explain why his weekend was draining, but he is convinced there is a fundamental problem with some of the new pieces he changed to is behind his disappearance rate.
“I’d like to know, it almost seems like something is fundamentally wrong because we were so out of time and at the expected pace, even Williams was faster than us at the end of the race, which is not where I should be. be our car, “Bottas said when asked by Motorsport.com about his lack of pace.
“We switched from the old package to the new package on Saturday, and since then the problem has started with the behavior of the car. Look, I’m pretty sure we’ll find something there.
“From Friday to Saturday, it seemed to me like we had lost the grip of the back, which is a bit strange because with the parts we changed we should have increased the back. So we have to find out what has failed.
“I haven’t had a chance to match Zhou’s times today, I was in another league, almost a second faster than it’s weird for me.”
Valtteri Bottas, Alfa Romeo C42, Lance Stroll, Aston Martin AMR22
Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images
Alfa Romeo’s head of track engineering, Xevi Pujolar, explained that both Bottas and Zhou executed exactly the same configuration as of Saturday after the Hinwil team completed a pre-specification on Friday as a precaution, which reinforced the idea that there was a problem underlying Bottas. car.
“From Saturday we started to have some question marks in Valtteri’s car,” Pujolar explained. “And today it has become clear that something is not working. We need to understand what it is right now, but we can see that something is wrong.”
“The two cars are definitely the same setup, I’d say it’s the same setup, everything was the same. There’s something not working as expected.”
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With a brief twist on the Canadian Grand Prix this weekend in Montreal, Pujolar said the team will try to change as many parts as possible to find the root cause, as it has no time to dump it. each individual part.
“Probably what will happen is that we will have to change as much as possible to fix the problem, but that is the limitation we have in such a quick change,” he added.
“Therefore, we will try to change as much as possible to make sure we return to our normal or expected performance.”