Valtteri Bottas played five seasons with the Mercedes team, during which he won 10 races and got 58 podiums, while Lewis Hamilton won four world championships.
After being forced to leave Mercedes after the arrival of George Russell, the only driver from the academy who has so far managed to reach the first team, Bottas decided to go to Alfa Romeo, a team in which he will be the first driver and in the which will have the Chinese driver, Guanyu Zhou, who will make his debut this season in Formula 1, as a partner.
The Finn, who is 32, has said he is excited about the opportunity to be the team’s most experienced driver for the first time since coming to Formula 1.
“Alfa Romeo has a great heritage in the automotive industry, but also in motorsport, so driving for this brand is a big responsibility,” said Bottas .
“For the first time in my career, I am the most experienced driver in the team, I think it was about time because I am going to start my tenth season.”
“So, without a doubt, I feel like I have a responsibility to guide the team, help them and give everything I have.”
Although Alfa Romeo is famous for its excellent facilities at Hinwil, the team is a far cry from the gargantuan Mercedes structure that Bottas has left behind.
Asked by Motorsport.com to compare the two factories, Bottas said he was initially surprised by the small number of staff he found when arriving at Alfa Romeo, but also stressed that a more compact size also had certain advantages.
“I’ve seen that they have big, good facilities which obviously come from the BMW days. I think they’ve invested quite a bit in the factory, so they have a good wind tunnel and good facilities.
“Perhaps what surprised me the most when I arrived was that there were considerably fewer people in the factory. It was less crowded, there were fewer people in all departments,” Bottas commented on the comparison of the Alfa Romeo staff with that of Mercedes .
“Obviously it’s a bit smaller, but I think this can also have its advantages in terms of how quickly you react to different things. You don’t have to go through ten people, you can go to one and tell them what we need to do.” do. I like that.”
One of the areas Alfa Romeo is trying to catch up on is with its new simulator, which it acquired in 2019 but only started actively using during the 2021 season, due to all the operational delays related to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19.
Bottas admitted that the simulator still needed some work to fine-tune the correlation with the real world.
“There’s still work to do and in fact a lot of the simulator work we’ve done, especially the early days, has been trying to develop the simulator rather than test the car properly,” explained the Finn.
“The work we have done with the new car has only been an estimate because I haven’t been able to drive it well in dry conditions yet.”
“After the Barcelona test, we will come back and try to do some correlation work. The physics and the software are all you need for a good simulator, but it still needs the last tweaks.”
