Feature

Team Talk - Sunday in Baku

Alfa Romeo

Valtteri Bottas
"We came here hunting for points and we leave with none, so I am obviously not very pleased about how our weekend went. Today it felt like a very long race as we were lacking pace: I believe there was something fundamentally wrong with the car, something we need to investigate. We will need to figure out what exactly happened before we get to Montreal, but I am convinced we will understand it and address it. Other than the outright pace, we did well as a team in terms of strategy and race execution, but that wasn't enough to bring home the points. I feel quite sorry for Zhou as he was doing a really good race prior to his retirement: today was not our day, but I am looking forward to Canada next week. It's been a while since we raced there and it'll be nice to be back."

Zhou Guanyu
"It's frustrating not to finish today, but I want to focus on the positives of my performance. Until the issue, my race had gone really well: I didn't do any mistake, I was competitive and I was running in the points. I had good pace and I know we could have brought home a good result. What happened is unfortunate, but the most important now is that we, as a team, solve this issue for the future so that we stop missing out on the opportunities we have. We'll investigate what the issue is in detail and we'll make sure we do come back stronger."

Frédéric Vasseur, team principal
"We end our Sunday here in Baku with a feeling of disappointment, as our streak of consecutive points finishes comes to an end after five good races. It was a big blow to lose Zhou with a technical issue today: until then, he had delivered an excellent performance, without a single mistake, and he was destined for the points. He deserved a good result today, but at least we can look at his performance knowing he's on an upward path. Valtteri had a difficult race and we have to analyse what went wrong: we weren't able to extract performance from the car throughout the weekend, and it's something we need to address before Montreal to make sure we return to the level we have been competing at this season."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.