Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN had a trouble-free day in Monza as the team kicked off their on-track activity for our home race, the Italian Grand Prix. Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu completed a good number of laps in the Italian sunshine, experiencing all available tyre compounds and gathering both short- and long-run data for the engineers to process tonight.

Valtteri Bottas: "It felt good to be out there, it is a nice track to be driving and it's even nicer when the car feels good like it did today. Pace-wise, we seem to be doing better than in the last couple of events, so that is promising looking ahead to Sunday. There is still some fine-tuning to do, but I feel we're not too much far off where we want to be, and we will be looking for any small gains we can get tonight. Our pace seems better than the position we are going to be starting from, because of the penalties, and I reckon here we can overtake and move up places. Hopefully, we can end our dry spell in terms of points and get back into the top ten."

Zhou Guanyu: "We seemed to be quite competitive straight away from off, which was good to see, and I can say that the car felt much better compared to last week in Zandvoort. I'm quite happy with the progress we're making but we know we need to keep working hard. Overall, it was super close once again today, and on a track like Monza it means two tenths could make the difference between Q2 and Q3. Qualifying tomorrow will be intense, and we still need to work hard overnight to put ourselves in the best for tomorrow."

Check out our Friday gallery from Monza here.