08/07/2022
NEWS STORY
Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN endured a challenging Friday at the Red Bull Ring, as Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu qualified for the Austrian Grand Prix in P13 and P18 respectively. The 11th round of the Formula One championship features a Sprint tomorrow, the results of which will determine the final grid positions for Sunday's race.
Frederic Vasseur, Team Principal: "It's been a difficult day for us in qualifying, with Valtteri in P13 and Zhou in 18th. The car was not at its optimal balance, and on such a short track, with such small margins separating teams in the midfield, not being at your 100% means you end up missing out on the top places. Tomorrow's sprint race is an opportunity to shake up the order a little and hopefully we can move up a few places with both drivers ahead of the race on Sunday. This is a track where overtaking is possible and where we had lots of action in previous years, even before the arrival of the new generation of cars, so we will give everything to bring back a positive result and set us up well for Sunday."
Valtteri Bottas: "The feeling with the car wasn't too bad, but obviously this is not where we want to be. It was close in the midfield, I lacked a bit of grip and top speed and these were the main issues in terms of laptime. Still, the laps were good and I am confident in the pace we can have in the race. I will start at the back of the grid on Sunday, but there are still points to be won tomorrow and we'll give everything we have to bring home some."
Zhou Guanyu: "Today has been quite a frustrating day for me: I struggled with the tyres on the first lap on a short track like this one. The tyres were working much better on the second lap of the run but, even though I slightly improved my lap time, I still didn't have the grip I wanted and that resulted in us being out in Q1. The car has obviously been built new and, having had just one session to get ready and adapt to it, this hasn't been the easiest for me either. Nevertheless, the car seems to be working fine, we just lacked some performance today. It's my second Sprint weekend overall, and I didn't really get to experience in the previous one in Imola as I was out in the first lap, but hopefully we will have a good one tomorrow and move up on the grid ahead of Sunday, so that we can battle for points. I think everything's open for us, we just have to figure out what went wrong today and improve from that."
Check out our Friday gallery from Spielberg here.