Bottas hails 'clear step' from Alfa Romeo but concerned over reliability

Valtteri Bottas admits completing a full race distance is his “biggest concern” ahead of this weekend’s season opener in Bahrain, after reliability troubles plagued Alfa Romeo in Formula 1 pre-season testing.

The Hinwil-based team has been hit with several issues over both tests in Barcelona and Bahrain, hampering Bottas and rookie team-mate Guanyu Zhou’s track time in the C42.

Although Alfa Romeo’s mileage improved over the three-day test at the Bahrain International Circuit, with the team completing the most laps on the final day, a late stoppage for Bottas provided another setback.

And while the Finn is upbeat at the direction Alfa’s performance is going, he conceded reliability was a major concern heading to the first race of the season.

“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,” Bottas said, as quoted by Motorsport.com.

“Because at the moment my kind of biggest concern is doing a race distance because we’ve had multiple different kinds of issues during this test.

“We’ve been able to fix them, and we just hope there’s no new issues coming up.”

Bottas, who will contest his tenth season in F1 since debuting in 2013, is buoyed by Alfa’s progress from a difficult 2021 campaign that saw it slip to ninth in the constructors’ standings, saying he is starting to gain more confidence in the car.

“In terms of performance, my feeling for now is that the team has made a clear step from last year’s [car] and that’s nice to see,” Bottas explained.

“Much better than Barcelona. And also, now at least I finally got a proper feel of the car. Today, especially in the first half of the afternoon, I did some really