26/07/2023
NEWS STORY
Alfa Romeo F1 Team KICK heads to one of the most iconic venues on the calendar, Spa-Francorchamps, for the final race ahead of the mid-season summer break. The team's C43 will sport a special livery for the event, celebrating the successful partnership between Alfa Romeo F1 Team KICK and the Kick.com streaming platform.
Spa-Francorchamps is a name that evokes emotions, memories, legends. It's a track that always produces spectacular racing, one steeped in tradition and that old-school feel of motorsport. It's a feature of the calendar that teams, drivers and fans look forward to with a sense of profound reverence.
Spa used to be synonymous with the restart of the season, after the summer break. It was a return to action after the holidays, a chance to get back with a fresh mindset: not this year. This time around, teams head to Spa for the final race of the first part of the season - and for what promises to be an exhilarating Sprint race in store for them.
An event on a track of such epic proportions - in length, in gradient, in history - gets an extra twist: an all-important Friday of practice and qualifying is followed by a Saturday of end-to-end competition, ahead of Sunday's spectacular. In the final act before the intermission of our summer break, we dig deep to find that extra bit of performance, the motivation and the strength to fight this crucial battle - and to race not once, but twice. We do so with the support of our fans, the commitment of our team both trackside and at home, and every ounce of our drivers' skill - on a track that knows how to reward the human factor.
The Belgian Grand Prix may have moved its location in the calendar, but its place in the collective imaginary of Formula One is not diminished - it is aggrandised. No longer a welcome return to action, it is now a superb crescendo before the holidays. The resilience and commitment of those competing this weekend will be no different from the previous years: but this Sprint weekend will magnify it into something special - and there's no better way to race in Spa.
Alessandro Alunni Bravi, Team Representative: "We head to Belgium, on the historic Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, for the second leg of this final back-to-back before Formula One heads into the summer break. As the first half of the season wraps up, it is time to take stock of the work done so far: there is no denying we were expecting more from our 2023 campaign, but there are still several races to go before the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi, and we are determined to give our all to turn the tide, starting from this weekend. Sunday's race in Budapest was a challenging one, as we couldn't convert our strong starting positions into a double points finish; nevertheless, the team has been working on analysing what went wrong, in order to avoid repetitions in the future. We aim to keep building on the solid performance shown on Saturday in qualifying, to get back in the top ten and finish the first half of the season on a high. With this being a Sprint event, we will need to execute perfectly from Friday onwards and make the most of any opportunity we may be presented with."
Valtteri Bottas: "Racing in Spa has always been enjoyable for me, and I have been on the podium three times there. It's a great place to bring the first part of the season to the end and hopefully turn a page from last Sunday. We definitely expected more from Budapest, especially taking into consideration the solid performance we had put up in qualifying. As a positive, we got confirmation that the fine tuning that has been done ever since we brought the new aero package has been working, and I am looking forward to being back on track again to unlock further potential from our car. Indeed, we wanted more from these first eleven races, but we are just halfway through the championship, and everything can still turn in our favour. We have seen in the past how races in Belgium can often be unpredictable, and on top of that, this will be a Sprint weekend: we will need to be at our very best from the very beginning to catch any potential opportunity to do well, to go into the summer break with more points added to our scoreboard."
Zhou Guanyu: "Hungary didn't go the way we had expected, as an unfortunate issue with the brake system strategy during the starting procedure compromised my race, pushing me at the back of the field, and Valtteri's as well. Still, that is now behind us, and we have used the few days between the two races to properly go through what happened. Spa usually marks the start of the second half of the season, while this time, it'll be the last race before the summer: it's been a tough first part of the season for our team, in which we surely had set higher expectations. Still, there are still many opportunities for us to kick back and put ourselves back where we belong, starting from this race."