Xevi Pujolar, Alfa Romeo's engineering director, stated that the team will have the same package throughout the weekends starting at Silverstone
Alfa Romeo is one of the good surprises of the season. After the change in Formula 1 regulations, the Italian-Swiss team jumped from the bottom of the grid to a constant fight with bigger-budget teams in the intermediate platoon. And, according to the director of track engineering, Xevi Pujolar, the situation will improve a bit more after the British GP. This is because the team will have the same car for the whole weekend.
According to Pujolar, the team had been using parts of the car from the old package, from before the Barcelona updates, in Friday free practice to prevent a crash from complicating qualifying and the race. So the 'real' car would only show up on Saturday. Only now has the team managed to produce enough of the updated parts to guarantee the whole weekend.
"We still have some problems with reliability on Fridays, it's something we are working on to improve. In terms of performance, also on Fridays, we have been using older packages. Starting with the next race, we will be in a position to use the same package throughout the weekend, something that will make it easier," he said.
"We had some incidents at the beginning of the season, and after that we had to compensate by producing replacement parts. In parallel to that, we still had the production of updates, a sequence that was limiting us. Now, from Silverstone on, we are in a good position," he continued.
"It was also a matter of margins... At tracks like Monaco, Baku, and Montreal, where you are always close to the wall, we wanted to make sure that if we had any damage on Friday, we would not have consequences for the rest of the weekend," he explained.
Pujolar also assessed the general expectations for Alfa Romeo at the British GP. Even with a lot of optimism.
"I think that fighting at the top of the intermediate pack is a real expectation, but we have to see. I don't know if some teams will go to Silverstone with updates, but so far I would say we have been very consistent on all tracks - different types of layouts and aerodynamic efficiency," he said.
"In the next few races, we want to fight at the top with Alpine and McLaren and see if we score more points and points with both drivers. That's our goal. We are in a position to go to Q3 with both cars, and if that happens, we can have solid races first in comparison with Alpine," he finished.
Formula One returns next weekend, July 1-3, at Silverstone with the British GP.