Feature

Team Talk - Sunday in Austin

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Alfa Romeo

Valtteri Bottas
“We gave everything out there today: strategy-wise, we did everything right, but unfortunately we just lacked pace throughout the weekend compared to our direct competitors. The bumpiness of the track also played a factor in our performance, as we had to run our car slightly higher than we wanted and thus sacrificed some downforce, which did not allow us to extract the most from our upgrades. As a slight positive, our direct competitors didn’t score many points either today, which leaves the battle for seventh in the championship still open. I am looking forward to heading to Mexico in just a couple of days: last year the track suited our car well, and that hopefully will allow us to quickly get back in competitive form.”

Zhou Guanyu
“We seemed to have a better car at the start of the weekend, especially after changing the setup after FP1, but in the end we couldn’t hold the positions we had claimed on Friday. Unfortunately, we just didn’t have enough pace to keep up with our direct competitors. I felt like I was lacking grip, and overall I haven’t really been able to get in the mix. I think this race has been quite tricky on our end, due to a lot of degradation; we will surely need to analyse what exactly happened this weekend, but I have the feeling that, whatever we could have changed in terms of tyres or strategy today, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Now, we will quickly regroup, and hopefully make a strong comeback next week in Mexico.”

Alessandro Alunni Bravi, team representative
"This weekend has been a tough one for our team: we lost ground throughout the sessions, and we will need to analyse everything in detail to quickly understand what didn’t work for us. The car balance on all tyre compounds just wasn’t there today, and that made both attacking and defending a difficult task for our drivers. Both Valtteri and Zhou drove a clean race, even though that wasn’t sufficient to advance through the field and score some points. There is quite a lot of work ahead of us over the next few days, before we head to Mexico for the second stage of this American triple header: I am confident that, with different track conditions, we’ll be able to quickly get back to the pace we had shown over the last couple of races, and get more chances to climb our way into the top ten again.”

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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.