Valtteri Bottas had a frustrating weekend in Baku after his pace completely faded on Saturday. In the race, he was an easy target occupying the last places, while his teammate, Guanyu Zhou was in the points zone until he was forced to retire due to a technical problem.
On Friday, Bottas finished ahead of Zhou in both practices. After switching to the new Alfa Romeo specification on Saturday morning, the Finn was suddenly some seven-tenths slower than the Chinese driver in FP3 and qualifying.
The #77 said he couldn’t explain why his weekend was so strange, but he is convinced a serious problem with some of the new parts was behind his frustrating pace.
“I wish I knew, it feels like something is really wrong, we were way off the pace we were expecting, even Williams was quicker late in the race, and that’s not the position our car should be in,” Bottas told Motorsport. .com.
“On Saturday we changed from the old package to the new one and that’s where the problem with the behavior of the car started. We’ll have a look, but I’m pretty sure we’ll find something.”
“From Friday to Saturday, we feel like we totally lost rear grip, which is a bit weird because with the parts we changed it should have increased. So we have to figure out what went wrong.”
“I didn’t have a chance to match Zhou’s lap times, he was in another league, almost a second faster, which for me is quite strange,” Bottas added.
Alfa Romeo track engineering boss Xevi Pujolar explained that both Bottas and Zhou had ridden in the exact same set-up from Saturday onwards, which obviously also reinforced the idea that there was a serious problem with the Finn’s car.
“From Saturday we began to detect some question marks in Valtteri’s car,” said Pujolar. “And today it became clear that something is wrong. We need to understand what it is.”
“Both cars have the same set-up, I would say it’s exactly the same, everything the same. But something was not working as we expected.”
With the 2022 Canadian Grand Prix just around the corner, the Alfa Romeo driver said they would try to change as many parts as possible to find the root of the problem, as they don’t have time to check each part individually.
“We will have to change as much as possible to make sure that we start again, with our normal or expected performance,” he concluded.
