From one Finn to another. After three years spent together with Kimi Raikkonen, in 2022 Alfa Romeo decided to focus on another Finnish with a long experience behind him, Valtteri Bottas. A choice that made it possible to support a young talent arriving from Formula 2, Zhou Guanyu, with a driver who knew how to lead the team by providing him with a direction to follow, thanks also to what he acquired in the period spent in a leading team such as Mercedes.
For 2023, Alfa Romeo has set in motion a renewal process in grand style, which has involved both the main technical aspects, such as the creation of a new aerodynamic look with sloping bellies, and some details often left behind floor.
Among the novelties, it did not go unnoticed that the Alfa Romeo team presented itself at the starting line with a new steering wheel, largely redesigned compared to the one used in the last championship following the indications of the driver from Nastola.
As it was for Raikkonen in 2019, Bottas also wanted to bring a touch of the past to his Swiss event, given that the new steering wheel takes up the shape of the one the Finn had used in Mercedes. Clearly the engineers of the Hinwil team were unable to totally revolutionize what they already had in hand, partly due to a question of costs, partly due to the complexity of the project, which would have required reviewing all the internal connections.
Nonetheless, Alfa Romeo has nevertheless attempted to make as many changes as possible to accommodate Bottas, but without distorting its identity, as some characteristic elements of the old specification have also been exported to the new model.
Although it may seem like only a secondary aspect, for a driver the comfort inside the cockpit represents one of the central elements for feeling at ease with the car, especially in an era where there are numerous parameters to manage in real time. In a sport where many challenges are resolved in hundredths of a second, even the details, such as the quick adjustments of the differential or of the braking distribution to adapt the balance corner by corner, can make the difference in terms of timing.
Steering wheel by Valtteri Bottas, Season 2022
Photo by: Gianluca D’Alessandro
After years spent in the same team, habits are created for a driver that are difficult to eradicate and this was one of the reasons why Sebastian Vettel asked the Aston Martin technicians to recreate a steering wheel similar to the one used in his time at Ferrari. It was a real race against time because, thanks to the regulations introduced to reduce costs in the COVID period, the development of the steering wheel would have been frozen from the first race of 2021 until the end of the season, with no possibility of modification.
Unlike the German, Bottas had to wait an extra year to see his indications transformed into something concrete, in the meantime agreeing to use the steering wheel that Raikkonen and Giovinazzi had exploited in their time spent in Hinwil.
The 2023 revolution has touched several points, starting from the shapes, which clearly reflect those of the Mercedes instrumentation both in terms of size and arrangement of buttons and knobs. The lower part has been cut and the three knobs to manage the various parameters, such as the Power Unit and the methods of use, have been repositioned.
The steering wheel used by Bottas in Mercedes.
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
Similarly, the selector, which resembles a nine-pointed star, follows that of the Brackley team: from this point of view, Zhou too has decided to align with his teammate, abandoning the standard solution designed by Alfa Romeo in use up until the past season.
The upper part has been partially redesigned, starting with the number of buttons next to the display. If until 2022 the pilots could count on a total of eight buttons, four for each side, this year the number has risen to ten overall, divided equally.
Although the idea was to get closer to the Mercedes style, which nevertheless has a slightly different arrangement, in this case the engineers of the Swiss team have maintained a clear link with their past, without completely distorting what was seen on the old specifications.
The Alfa Romeo C43 steering wheel
Photo by: Alfa Romeo
To insert the fifth button in the upper part, however, it was also necessary to review the system that managed the lateral rotary with which to modify various criteria, such as the differential or the engine brake. Until last year, the wheels on the spokes had multiple functions: for example, on Bottas’ wheel the left one could control both the differential in high-speed corners and the engine braking, while the right one was dedicated to brake management migration and braking modulation (brake-cmp). To alternate the functions it was necessary to press a button on the sides of the rotary, with the change of mode signaled by a small LED light.
For 2023, this system has been completely abandoned, because those same functions have actually been merged into the three little levers located underneath the steering wheel. For example, on this year’s Bottas model the left rotary is exclusively responsible for managing the differential at high speeds (HS), while the engine brake can be modified by using the lever at the bottom left by moving the selector to “EB” .
In the same way, other options, such as the button for activating the starting procedure (RS), have been incorporated into the central manettino in order to free up space in the lower area and reduce the overall dimensions, with a small gain also in terms of weight.
The other side of the steering wheel, the rear one, hasn’t undergone such profound structural changes compared to past years, maintaining the configuration with an extended lever for gear changing and switches at the top for quickly modifying some pre-set parameters. However, there are two elements worthy of note: the first concerns the shape of the gearshift paddles, completely redesigned compared to 2022, while the second concerns the clutch.
During his time at Brackley, Bottas had always used a split lever solution, with the clutch being controlled via two independent paddles, one for each hand. Although the regulation provides that only one is used at a time, this solution has some advantages: firstly, during pit stops it allows for greater ease of use as the driver can use one of the two levers at will depending on the position of the pitch of the pits compared to the pit lane.
The second aspect lies in the fact that the two-lever layout generally has a greater excursion than the plane, varying the sensitivity at the point of detachment of the clutch and in the release phase. Drivers tend to adapt to what the team offers, but there have been cases in which certain drivers have expressly requested changes to align with past habits, as was the case for Carlos Sainz’s transition from McLaren to Ferrari in 2021.
Passing from one alternative to another is not a simple process either for the team standard-bearers or for the teams, who are forced to intervene both on the pivots around which the lever turns and on other elements of the structure. For this reason, last year Bottas had to adapt to a solution never used before, not even in the seasons disputed with Williams, i.e. the use of a single rocker arm which was by now part of the Alfa Romeo philosophy for various championships.
With the new steering wheel, this aspect has also been revised, returning the double paddle system to the Finn. Given the reconfiguration of the levers, the case where you insert your fingers to get a better grip has also been redesigned. From the images it is possible to see how the two riders of the Hinwil team opted for slightly different solutions: the one chosen by Bottas was more contained in terms of size, the one desired by Zhou was more generous.
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