“Two cars in the points, the first point for Zhou” – Alfa Romeo team principal Fred Vasseur is delighted with both Valtteri Bottas and debutant Guanyu Zhou finishing in the points in the season-opening Bahrain GP.
The Ferrari cars had an exceedingly impressive in Bahrain this weekend, with all three teams – Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, and Haas – amongst the points.
Alfa Romeo had a double-points finish, handing them 9 points, just 4 short of their overall tally last season. This led to suggestions that the Ferrari engine is the reason for the jump in performance, something Alfa Romeo boss Fred Vasseur begged to differ on.
“When you are in the shit you don’t have to do a split, and when you are in good shape you don’t have to do the split also.
“It was a very good result. We had a decent qualy and the pace was I think amazing.
“The only issue was Valtteri lost 12 positions, or something like that, on lap one and it was difficult to recover.
“Overall it is a very good result for the team – two cars in the points, the first point for Zhou and I’m very pleased for him also because he did a great job all weekend. ”
With Bottas P6 and Zhou P10, @alfaromeoorlen pick up their first double-points finish since 2020 💪 #BahrainGP #F1 pic.twitter.com/7xjzw0N28b
— Formula 1 (@F1) March 20, 2022
Valtteri Bottas lost eight places on opening lap
Bottas had an impressive outing after moving from Mercedes, but it could easily have been worse for the Finn. He went down to P14 from P6, something Alfa Romeo is keen to analyse and work on.
“I think he was on the right-hand side and had too much wheel spin and then he lost a bit of momentum on lap one. But okay, we have to fix it, understand what happened exactly.
“We didn’t do many starts [in testing] with the car and Valtteri but I think we will fix it quite soon.”
