After missing the top ten again, Valtteri Bottas regretted his lack of pace throughout the weekend and admitted he didn't understand Alfa Romeo's low performance in Azerbaijan
Valtteri Bottas once again finished a Formula 1 race outside the top ten in Azerbaijan last Sunday (12) - something that hadn't happened since the race in Jeddah, which marked the second round of the season. And the worst part was not even the result, but the feeling of not being able to explain the low performance of the car throughout the weekend. When asked, the Finn made it clear that he still can't explain the loss of performance.
"I would like to know, I almost feel that something is really wrong," Bottas complained, without knowing how to explain the reason for the low performance. "Because we were very far from the expected lap times and pace. Even the Williams were faster than us at the end of the race, something our car cannot allow," he pointed out.
Bottas explained that Alfa Romeo made a change to their car that didn't pay off and ended up translating into a loss of performance. Still, he could not explain why he was so far below the pace of even his teammate, Chinese rookie Guanyu Zhou - who got 0s6 ahead in qualifying and abandoned the race when he was tenth, ahead of Valtteri.
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"We changed from the old [updates] package to the new one on Saturday, and since then the problem started with the behavior of the car," he explained. "We will look, I am convinced that we will find something," he stated.
Finally, Bottas admitted that keeping up with Zhou's pace throughout the 51 laps of the Azerbaijan GP became an impossible task and lamented the change made to the car by Alfa Romeo, which did not achieve the expected effect - and worse, he still does not understand why the single-seater got worse from one day to the next.
"From Friday to Saturday we seemed to have lost grip at the rear, which is a bit strange because with the parts we changed, we should have felt an improvement at the rear," he said. "So we need to know what went wrong. I had no chance to keep up with Zhou's lap times, he was on another level, almost 1s faster than me - which is strange," he admitted.
Bottas' next opportunity to understand the behavior of the C42 on the track will be as early as this weekend, when Formula One holds the Canadian Grand Prix from June 17-19.