Zhou Guangyu believes that Alfa Romeo F1 Team Orlen is “Clearly something is missing” in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship midfield battle after Zhou extended his scoreless streak to six runs in the Dutch Grand Prix.
Starting in fourteenth place, Zhou was able to maintain his starting position during the early stages of the race. An aggressive strategy choice by the Alfa Romeo team saw Zhou drive his first two stints of the race on the soft compound tire and by lap thirty-two the Chinese driver was in twelfth place.
Zhou would eventually have to switch to medium compound tires and would return from the pits in fifteenth place. Zhou stated that shortly after his second pit stop any possible progress was halted as he had to slow down for a series of blue flags.
Alfa Romeo attempted to take advantage of the late safety car by pitting the twenty-three-year-old driver for a set of used soft tires for the end of the race, but Zhou was unable to generate any performance on the used set and would come. home to finish in sixteenth place.
The Swiss-based team has now been unable to achieve a points finish since the Canadian Grand Prix in June and before this weekend Italian Grand PrixZhou is looking at improvements to the C42 package, hoping the team can re-enter the fray in midfield.
“Today was quite a tough race, especially towards the end as all the blue flags slowed us down a lot. The last safety car didn’t work in our favor either, as there wasn’t much time left and we put in used softs which didn’t make loading any easier.
“It’s been a challenging weekend overall for the team, we’ve clearly been missing something compared to the rest of the midfield, so we’ll have to work hard these days – we need to make sure we improve ahead of Monza next week and during the rest of the season, to try and get back to where we were, performance-wise, during the first few races of the year.”
Valtteri Bottas: “It’s always disappointing to finish a race early”
Valtteri Bottas believes a third consecutive race retirement in the 2022 Formula 1 season was due to an alleged power unit failure today in Zandvoort. As a result of today’s early retirement, Bottas followed his teammate and extended his scoreless streak to six races.
A poor performance in qualifying yesterday saw Bottas eliminated in Q1 for the second successive race, leaving the Finn with the unlikely task of salvaging a finish inside the points-paying positions.
The Alfa Romeo driver made a poor start to the race falling back three positions on the first lap to 19th, but was then able to stabilize on the soft compound tires and by lap 15 found himself in 10th place.
Bottas used the same aggressive strategy as his teammate at Zandvoort, opting for two stints on soft tires before looking to finish the race on a set of medium tyres. With the ten-time race winner running in thirteenth place, disaster struck Bottas when a suspected engine failure brought the Finn to a stop on lap fifty-five on the start-finish straight.
Despite his race ending early once again, Bottas was optimistic about the team’s competitive race pace today and felt that had the engine failure not occurred, he could have left Zandvoort with a points finish.
“It is always disappointing to finish a race early. I felt the pace of the car was better than yesterday, we had continued to make progress, although it would still have been a challenge to score points.
“The midfield battle was pretty good and there was a lot of action, but then we had a technical problem and our race was over. I’m waiting for confirmation, but I think it was a problem with the power unit – there was no signal before that, everything felt fine and suddenly I lost power. I could see some flames in the back, so now we’ll have to see what we find there.”