BEIJING, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) according to the F1 world championship News, in the pre-season test in Bahrain last week, the performance of the Alfa Romeo C43 car encouraged the entire team, both Botas and Zhou Guanyu were excited by the progress of the team in some specific areas throughout the winter.
Zhou Guanyu said that improving the tail of the racing car has always been the top priority of designers this winter. “This is one of our main goals,” he said. “We tried to solve this problem in the second half of the season (last year), but when we solved this problem, we lost some racing performance. This year, we tried to restore the performance at the beginning of last season. High-speed performance was our weakness last year. Therefore, we try to improve this point, which seems to work well. Now, the improvement we have made seems obvious.”
“Compared with this time last year, as far as I am concerned, we had a very smooth day. On Friday, I drove the car all day. We did long distance and short distance. We looked very competitive. We seemed to find the speed we lost at the end of the competition.”
In addition to the better feeling of driving the car, there were only sporadic failures in the three days of the reliability of the Alfa Romeo car (the morning stage of the last day of Bothas once stopped on the track due to suspected power unit problems), it is also good news.
The 138 laps completed by the two drivers on the first day are in sharp contrast to the limited number of laps that hit drivers in the first round of tests in Barcelona last year. 12 months ago, in the first round test conducted in Barcelona, the car failed to finish more than 100 laps every day, even only 32 laps on the first day.
Botas said that the improvement of reliability was a key step taken by the team when he came: “The main positive thing is that we don’t have a problem, which is in sharp contrast to last year’s test,” he said. “Therefore, at least we started smoothly and got some proper mileage. For now, this is very important.”
When asked if he thought the reliability problem that caused trouble to the team in several Grand Prix last year had been solved, Bothas said after the first day of testing: “I think all the major problems we encountered in chassis last year have been well confirmed.”
“Many concepts have changed, such as heat dissipation when we encounter multiple problems. At least (the first day) shows that we can finish the mileage of more than two matches without any problem. This is a good thing.”
“Therefore, I believe the car will definitely be better than last year. Obviously, we did have many problems with Ferrari power units last year. But so far, there is nothing.” (Finished)
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