Frédéric Vasseur Rues End of Alfa Romeo’s Points Scoring Run in Azerbaijan

Frédéric Vasseur admitted to being disappointed to see Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN’s points-scoring run come to an end in Sunday’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

For the first time since the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, neither Valtteri Bottas nor Zhou Guanyu managed to finish inside the top ten, with the former’s eleventh place the best result of the weekend for the Hinwil-based outfit.

Vasseur, the Team Principal at Alfa Romeo, said it was a ‘big blow’ to see Zhou’s race end in an early retirement when the Chinese driver was on course for the top ten, and the team will analyse just what went wrong with his C42-Ferrari.

However, despite the retirement, Vasseur felt Zhou’s performance prior to his retirement proved that his development path is continuing on an upward swing, and he hopes he can be rewarded in the next few races in Canada and Great Britain.

“We end our Sunday here in Baku with a feeling of disappointment, as our streak of consecutive points finishes comes to an end after five good races,” said Vasseur.  

“It was a big blow to lose Zhou with a technical issue today: until then, he had delivered an excellent performance, without a single mistake, and he was destined for the points. He deserved a good result today, but at least we can look at his performance knowing he’s on an upward path.”

Vasseur says the team will need to look into why Bottas was off the pace at the Baku City Circuit, and he hopes the pace he’s shown throughout the rest of the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season returns in Canada this coming weekend.

“Valtteri had a difficult race and we have to analyse what went wrong: we weren’t able to extract performance from the car throughout the weekend, and it’s something we need to address before Montreal to make sure we return to the level we have been competing at this season,” said Bottas.