Alfa Romeo has made a clear step compared to its performance last year, according to Valtteri Bottas, but raised doubts over its current reliability.
Alfa Romeo had a subdued first test in Spain but showed stronger speed in Bahrain, and also completed more laps, finishing fourth of the 10 teams in the mileage charts.
“At the moment, now, the biggest concern is getting the race distance done,” said Bottas.
“We’ve had multiple, different kind of issues, these tests, but we’ve been always able to fix them and we hope there are no issues coming up.
“Otherwise, in terms of performance, my feeling now is that the team has made a clear step forward from the last years and that’s nice to see.
“In testing you can’t really see the whole picture but we’re not far off from where we should be.”
Bottas outlined that he and Alfa Romeo are beginning to get the C42 into its optimal operating window.
“For sure there was more [potential], but I think that there’s more from everyone, as that’s normal in testing,” he said.
“But when the car works, it’s not bad. I was really starting to like the car, both in high fuel and with a little bit lower fuel it felt pretty decent.
“We’ve got a clear direction for the set-up that we still need to go to, to extract more performance, because, in general, it’s not easy to turn the car quickly and early.
“That’s also a characteristic of the new tyres, the fronts are quite weak in combined braking especially. It was a good day for learning, and the main thing is that we need to fix all the issues we’re having now.”
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