21/07/2023
NEWS STORY
Alfa Romeo F1 Team Stake returned to action at the Hungaroring during the two Friday practice sessions for the Hungarian Grand Prix. Despite the first session being affected by a couple of red flags and mixed weather conditions, Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu got the most out of their time on track, gathering important data for the engineers on the intermediate tyres. During the second session, the focus was put on further optimising the package introduced last time out in Silverstone, practicing both race simulations and qualifying runs on the medium compound, which will be used in Q2 tomorrow.
The team will now analyse the data collected during the sessions, aiming to make another step forward ahead of tomorrow's qualifying session in Budapest.
Valtteri Bottas: "We got decent running during the second practice session, contrary to the first one, when we could only do a handful of laps because of two red flags. The medium tyres seem to work well on our car, stability seemed good, which is especially needed on this track. Overall, it's safe to say it has been a positive day of learning. Of course, like always, Q3 will be our main target tomorrow, as it seems this track layout is suiting our car better; there is still work to do, and an important session ahead of us tomorrow. Qualifying will be very interesting, with the new compound rules, and I am looking forward to that. Our effort tonight will go into fine tuning our package even more, in order to come fully prepared ahead of Saturday."
Zhou Guanyu: "I have been quite happy with the car today, despite the circumstances meaning we only had the second practice session to get the most out of the car. So far, everything seems to be heading in the right direction, but it is obviously difficult to predict what will happen in qualifying now. Looking at today's results, we appear to be in a stronger position than we were in Silverstone; it will be of course interesting to see how our car will perform on the hard tyres in Q1 tomorrow: no one has that answer yet. Being all on the same compound tomorrow will be challenging, and we will make sure to further optimise our performance during the third and final practice session in the morning to fully extract our potential in Qualifying."
Check out our Friday gallery from the Hungaroring here.