Valtteri Bottas: Great race in a fast car!

Valtteri Bottas continues to surprise Alfa Romeo fans with consistent results, finishing fifth at Imola on Sunday, marking a dignified end to the Italian weekend after finishing 7th in yesterday’s sprint. The fifth place is by the way the best result of the Swiss team from Brazil’19.

The day was more difficult for his partner: Guanyu Zhou started from the pit lane and was 15th at the finish of the race.

Frederic VasseurTeam Principal: “The team performed well this weekend, we earned 12 points in two days and this is a well deserved reward.

For the podium in Imola we prepared some new products and they worked well. All the team members gave their best – both those who stayed on base and the race team on track, as she had to repair two damaged cars.

Today we had a decent race with Valtteri showing a fast pace and fighting for 4th place until the last lap. Zhou’s task after yesterday’s crash was more difficult, but he recovered well from the pitlane start and finished 15th with some good overtaking moves.

We have had a lot of positive experiences this weekend and it’s not just about the result, but also the way the team works, so we can look forward to even better results in the next races.”

Valtteri Bottas (5th): “A fun race! It’s always nice to score points, today I had a great race in a fast car. Despite a small loss of time at the pit stop, I’m happy with how everything went – and ten points.

At the start of the race I had to be nervous – I couldn’t avoid a collision with Riccardo and Sainz, but the car was not damaged. After she switched to Medium she had a particularly good pace, and it was only towards the end when I overtook Russell that the right rear tire started to granulate leading to a loss of effectiveness.

The team worked well, it’s great that all our innovations worked. There is a lot of racing and work ahead, we will try to add and spend a few more weekends like this.

Guanyu Zhou (15th): “I didn’t get the result I wanted, but the weekend left a lot of positive moments. Especially during the first weekend of my career, I was able to quickly pick up the desired speed with a sprint on Saturday.

The weekend started better than expected, I qualified well, but the sprint really ruined the end result. It’s always been hard to get into the top ten after starting from the pit lane, but today it was really hard to overtake and by the time I was ahead of the Williams the cars in front were too far behind.

In difficult conditions I learned a lot, this experience will help to achieve more in the next races.