Bottas: We finally have a new clutch

Ferrari-powered teams will get a redesigned clutch from this weekend, which is hoped will help both builders and drivers improve the starting momentum.

Alfa Romeo, one of Ferrari’s two customer teams, had some problems from the start of the season, manifesting themselves right at the start of the race, so Valtteri Bottas and Guangyu Zhou were at a somewhat disadvantageous position against their direct rivals.

Ahead of the start of the French race weekend, Bottas revealed that Ferrari’s engineers had developed a new clutch that would allow for a more efficient start.

“Finally we have a new clutch,” said the Finnish Alfa Romeo driver. – For the first time we will try it on training. Ferrari has been working on it for a while and now we have some redesigned clutch components to avoid vibration.”

When asked to what extent these problems manifested themselves in the first half of the season, Valtteri replied: “They interfered quite a bit. Because of this we often lost positions at the start, which is bad because in the middle of the pack there is a very sharp rivalry. If you are behind someone’s car, you can stand behind it twenty laps.

All this does not make life easier for you, and let’s hope that there will be no such problems now.

Speaking of the Ferrari drivers, Carlos Sainz spoke of similar issues encountered at the start: “We identified a problem with the car that made it impossible to start as efficiently as last year. It has probably also affected our customer teams.

But now we know what the problem is. We don’t pay attention to it and try to talk less about it because it doesn’t always happen and we don’t lose positions at every start, but still this car doesn’t come off perfectly.

I hope that this season we will continue to work on improving the starting procedure and that everything will be in order next year.