“Our car tends to be stronger in the race” – Alfa Romeo’s Frédéric Vasseur

Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN are looking strong ahead of Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix, despite a mixed qualifying result. Valtteri Bottas performed brilliantly to qualify in seventh, whilst Guanyu Zhou could only manage fifteenth.

Bottas ended Saturday as ‘best of the rest’, and did well to recover from a disappointing Friday. The Finnish driver has a great chance at scoring some big points during the Grand Prix, where overtaking looks set to be a challenge.

Zhou had the pace to qualify better than he did, however, the Chinese driver didn’t have a new set of soft tyres to use in Qualifying 2, having used all his fresh sets during the opening part of qualifying. Despite this, Zhou has got the pace to battle for points on Sunday, if he can work his way through the midfield.

Alfa Romeo Team Principal Frédéric Vasseur, is confident that points can be scored by both drivers during the race at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

“The team bounced back really strongly from a challenging Friday, and this clearly shows we are not letting any adversity get in the way of our work. On this day, P7 on the grid was the best possible result and Valtteri delivered an impressive lap to bring home this result.

“He will be in an excellent position to fight for a points finish – and so will be Zhou, who showed really good pace so far this weekend. We know our car tends to be stronger in race trim, so both drivers will be in a condition to battle the cars around them and hopefully bring home some more points.”