Alfa Romeo admit they “struggled more than expected” in Jeddah race · RaceFans

In brief

Alfa Romeo unclear on Jeddah struggles

Alfa Romeo’s head of trackside engineering Xevi Pujolar says the team do not why they lacked pace in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

Valtteri Bottas finished eighth in the Bahrain Grand Prix but came in ten places lower at the next round. His team mate Zhou Guanyu also failed to score.

“In terms of performance in qualifying, we were same or even a step better than Bahrain,” said Pujolar. “On Friday we were struggling a bit, we were doing some tests, just trying to explore different areas on the car configuration to see if we could extract a bit more.

“We saw some improvements in some areas, but we lost too much in some others, and then we revert back on Saturday. We were close to Q3, and everyone was very, very tight.”

Based on their qualifying pace, and Bahrain result, Alfa Romeo thought they would spend the race fighting with at least one of the cars that reached Q3. They instead faced a trying night.

“In the race, I think we struggled a bit more with the grip more than what we expected,” Pujolar said. “Everyone is so close that as soon as you lose a bit of pace, you struggle to get back there fighting for the points.

“With Valtteri, at the moment we’re still investigating. Now that we have the car, we will check what happened for him. For sure something wasn’t working as expected. We could see with the level of sliding and how everything was going on with all the tyres, that’s why we said ‘okay, initially, maybe something with a specific compound’, but we tried different compounds and do the same with all of them. So in that car we need to find the problem.

“With Zhou, he was better, running close to what we would expect, but still not enough. And on that one, we just need to now analyse everything and see what we could do.The pace that we had was not as good as we had in qualifying. So we need to understand if it’s grip-limited, if it’s power-limited. We need to analyse, compare to the competitors and see what we can do. But at the moment I don’t think we need to be too worried.”

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