Formula 1: Valtteri Bottas will drive for Alfa Romeo this year: Valtteri Bottas will be seen in a new outfit this year as he will drive for Alfa Romeo. He was with Mercedes for five seasons. Meanwhile, in those five seasons, he took 10 wins and 58 podiums while Lewis Hamilton won four Formula 1 titles. Follow F1 Updates on InsideSport.IN.
The Finn driver is excited about the prospect of being Alfa Romeo’s most experienced driver. It will be his career first as he was always in the shadow of Hamilton while driving for Mercedes. Bottas said, “Alfa Romeo has a great heritage in the automotive industry and also racing. So driving for the brand is a big responsibility.”
Formula 1: Valtteri Bottas relishes fresh challenge as Alfa Romeo’s leader ahead of 2022 F1 season – Check Out
BREAKING: Valtteri Bottas will join Alfa Romeo next season on a multi-year deal from Mercedes#F1 pic.twitter.com/y8JKlNDKb6
— Formula 1 (@F1) September 6, 2021
“And actually, for the first time in my career, I’m the more experienced driver of the team. I think it’s about time because I’m starting my 10th season. So, I definitely feel like I have the responsibility to guide the team and help the team and give everything I have.”
Mercedes opted to get George Russell from Williams this year in place of Bottas. He will be joining Alfa Romeo as the team’s lead driver. Meanwhile, he will be partnered with the Chinese rookie Guanyu Zhou.
Formula 1: Alfa Romeo’s facilities and smaller team
Alfa Romeo has great facilities in Hinwil and also has a smaller team as compared to Mercedes. When he compared the two factories he was surprised with the reduced number of staff at Alfa Romeo. He also noted that the compact size of the team has its advantages.
Valtteri added, “I saw that they have big, good facilities, obviously from the BMW days. I think they invested quite a bit in the factory, so good wind tunnel, good facilities. Maybe what was a little bit surprising was that there was quite a few people in the factory. It was less busy, fewer people in all the different departments of the factory.”
Formula 1: Valtteri Bottas relishes fresh challenge as Alfa Romeo’s leader ahead of 2022 F1 season – Check Out
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“Definitely it’s a bit smaller. I feel like it can also have an advantage in terms of how quickly you can react to different things. You don’t need to go through 10 people. You can just go to one person and say what we need to do. So, it’s nice.”
Formula 1: Valtteri Bottas has his say on the driver in the loop simulator
It is one of the areas where Alfa Romeo are trying to catch up. It was acquired in 2019 but started being used during the 2021 season. It was due to the operational delays because of the Covid 19 pandemic.
Valtteri feels that the simulator still needs some work to fine-tune the correlation with the real world. He further asserted, “There is work to do and actually a lot of the sim work we’ve done, especially the first days. It was all about trying to develop the simulator instead of actually testing the car properly.”
“With the new car, the work we’ve done has been only an estimation. Because I haven’t driven the new car properly in dry conditions yet. After the Barcelona test, we’ll go back and we’ll try to do some correlation work. The hardware and software are everything you need for a good simulator, but it still needs some fine-tuning.”
Formula 1: Valtteri Bottas relishes fresh challenge as Alfa Romeo’s leader ahead of 2022 F1 season – Check Out
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