Formula 1: How Alfa Romeo can fix their most glaring issue

Alfa Romeo’s 2022 Formula 1 season has been marred by poor reliability, but this is something that Valtteri Bottas believes they can improve upon in 2023.

Through the first several races of the 2022 Formula 1 season, Alfa Romeo looked like they may very well be in contention for fourth place in the constructor standings with Alpine and McLaren, a marked improvement from last year when they finished in ninth out of 10 teams on the grid.

But those prospects have since faded, and one of the major reasons behind that has been poor reliability.

Valtteri Bottas is in his first season with the team after a five-year run with Mercedes, and teammate Zhou Guanyu is a rookie after spending the last three seasons in Formula 2.

Combined, Bottas and Zhou have only managed to record 24 finishes in 36 starts. Zhou has seven retirements this season, tied for the most in Formula 1, and Bottas has five. Eight of those 12 retirements have been caused by something other than a crash.

After Bottas started the season with seven top nine finishes in nine races, he hasn’t scored since, and during his nine-race scoreless streak, Zhou has only managed a single point. Because of his strong start, Bottas still sits in 10th place in the driver standings. Zhou sits in 18th.

Alfa Romeo still sit in sixth place in the constructor standings, and if they finish there, it would mark a three-place improvement from last year, which would still make them the most improved team in the first season of this new era of rules and regulations.

However, things have tightened up between Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Haas, and AlphaTauri, with just 18 points blanketing the four teams in this fight.

“Need to get some points,” Bottas told Beyond the Flag when asked about his goals for the final four races of the 2022 season.

The season’s four final races include the United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas (Sunday, October 23), the Mexico City Grand Prix at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez (Sunday, October 30), the Sao Paulo Grand Prix at Interlagos Circuit (Sunday, November 6), and the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix at Yas Marina Circuit (Sunday, November 13).

“I think now, as a team, we need to secure sixth place in the constructors, which already is a step forward from the last two years; the team was ninth,” he continued. “That’s the goal for this year. But of course, in the future, we definitely want more. Just having clean, consistent races, scoring points in all of the remaining races; that’s the goal.”

Bottas remains optimistic about next season as well. He believes that the one glaring issue of lack of reliability is something that can be avoided with more testing time.

Before the start of this season, Alfa Romeo experienced unexpected issues which ultimately limited their time spent testing, and that has had somewhat of a domino effect on their season.

“As a team, we’ve had quite a few reliability issues this year, partly because the winter testing we had was so limited,” he said. “We had many issues, so we didn’t get the mileage in the car, and when you don’t get the mileage in testing, then issues can appear later on in the year with certain parts.

“So obviously next year is going to be a new car again that we’ve been designing and soon producing at the factory in Switzerland. Hopefully the new car is fast and reliable, and that way we can definitely make a step forward.”