Formula 1: Valtteri Bottas outlines key area Alfa Romeo needs to improve

Valtteri Bottas has given his verdict on where he feels Alfa Romeo needs to improve to build on this season in Formula 1.

Bottas joined Alfa at the start of this year having left Mercedes and after a few issues in pre-season testing, the car looked pretty competitive in the early stages of the year.

Indeed, you could make a fair argument that they actually had the third-quickest car behind Red Bull and Ferrari in certain environments, and that was some turnaround from where they were at the end of last year where they ran around towards the wrong end of the field for much of the campaign.

As the season has wore on, though, Alfa have found themselves falling down the pecking order with Mercedes naturally getting their act together and Alpine and McLaren also overtaking them and opening up a bit of a gap in the standings.

Indeed, before Alfa earned a point at Monza last time out via Zhou Guanyu, they had not scored since Canada and that rather underlines the struggles they’ve had in the middle of the 2022 campaign, with reliability issues rearing their head and also a dearth of upgrades being brought compared to some of those around them.

READ MORE: F1 2023 CALENDAR CONFIRMED

They’re working hard, though, and Bottas believes simply adding personnel to their relatively small team will only help them going forwards, with them very much punching above their weight this season:

“One of the problems we’ve encountered is related to the production speed of different components. The team has taken this aspect very seriously,” he said when speaking to the Italian branch of Motorsport.com.

“We are aware that we need more resources because we found ourselves having projects brought to the wind tunnel but not realised for lack of