Valtteri Bottas starred in his first qualifying in the 2022 Formula 1 season with his new team, placing sixth, along with his former teammate at Mercedes, Lewis Hamilton.
But at the start, the Finn skidded after being gobbled up by the chasing group, including the Alpines and the Haas, as well as a surprising Alex Albon. He continued to drop positions during the first lap, becoming 14th.
Bottas revealed that Alfa Romeo starts had been a recurring problem throughout pre-season, so he had already lined up on the grid fearing a clutch malfunction.
“Honestly, I wasn’t very confident going to the grid, because 50% of the starts we’ve had in practice and testing have been bad,” Bottas said.
“It’s an area we have to work on. I’ve had a big slide. I’ve burned the rear tyres, I was still spinning in third gear, and then on the first lap I was spinning and kind of helpless.
“It’s a mechanical thing, sometimes we have this vibration in the clutch. It happens 50% of the time,” he described.
“And when that happens it’s pretty easy to lose traction. So yeah, it’s on the list and we’re working on it.”
Xevi Pujolar , Alfa Romeo’s chief track engineer, explained that the Hinwil team had made “some progress” in fixing the clutch issue, which also affected Bottas’s teammate Zhou Guanyu .
The fact that the first two races of the 2022 F1 season are being held on two consecutive weekends is not playing in the team’s favour, but Pujolar hopes Alfa can mitigate the problem at this week’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
“Both cars experienced a very poor start and then not only the start but also trying to get grip and avoid incidents during the first lap.
“We’re going to have to take some steps and try to understand a little bit more, see how we can fix it, or try to mitigate as much as possible for next week, because we don’t have that many days.”
“We see that we are not the only ones who are experiencing these kinds of problems, but for us it was worse.”
Bottas recovered to finish sixth on his Alfa debut thanks to solid race pace and relatively benign tire degradation compared to some mid-table rivals, while rookie Zhou scored a point in 10th after the double late retirement from both Red Bulls.
