Valtteri Bottas believes Alfa Romeo has made a clear step forward this year, but the Finn remains concerned by his new team's reliability after pre-season testing.
After a troubled first test in Barcelona, Alfa Romeo encountered fewer problems this week in Bahrain.
But a few gremlins still crept into the Swiss outfit's works, with Bottas missing the final forty minutes of Saturday's final session due to a technical issue.
Nevertheless, Bottas and teammate Guanyu Zhou managed to log a healthy amount of mileage on the day, with an aggregate 150 laps that gives the former Mercedes driver a reason to believe that Alfa is on the right path when it comes to solving its reliability issues.
©AlfaRomeo
"I’ll be more confident once we speak with the team next week and when I hear that all the issues we understand 100% and we make sure that they don’t happen again," said the Finn after Saturday's running.
"Because at the moment now my biggest concern is doing a race distance.
"We’ve had multiple different kind of issues during this test, but we’ve been able to fix them and we just hope there’s no new issues coming up.
"Otherwise, in terms of performance, my feeling for now is that the team has made a clear step from last year. And that’s nice to see. You know testing, we can’t say in detail, but it’s not far off where we should be."
Bottas said that he slowly grew more comfortable with Alfa's C42 during testing, regardless of the car's fuel levels.
"When it works, it’s not bad," he said. "I was really starting to like the car.
"Both high fuel and a little bit lower fuel it felt pretty decent. We got a clear direction on the set-up that we still need to go to extract more performance.
"Still, it’s not easy in general to turn the car quickly and early enough in the corners.
"I think it’s also a characteristic of the new tyres, they are quite weak on the combined braking [and steering], the front tyres especially.
"It was a good day for learning and the main thing is we just need to fix all the issues we’ve been having now."
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