F1 Montreal, Bottas chasing points: “We are close to our rivals”

by VALERIO BARRETTA

Kick Sauber, in Montreal to move the rankings

With the points brought home by Alex Albon in Monte-Carlo, Williams left the uncomfortable company of Kick Sauber at the bottom of the constructors’ standings: now the Hinwil team is the only one with zero points in the World Championship. Hard to believe that Valtteri is in Montreal Bottas and Guanyu Zhou can reverse course, but the Quebec track has recently brought luck to the team, here with points in both 2022 and 2023.

Bottas’ words

Just as F1 is entering the hottest phase of the market, the Finn (whose contract is expiring) believes in the possibility of achieving his first top-10 of the season, which would allow him to be more attractive to other teams: “We return overseas after a difficult back-to-back between Imola and Monaco. Even though our performances did not live up to our expectations, we are determined to put everything behind us and start again: we know how hard everyone is working within the team and we know that, in absolute terms, the gap from those before us is not insurmountable“.

“We go to Montreal hungry for points and positive results, and everyone in Hinwil has worked hard over the last two weeks to achieve this. We are all close, the competition is tough, but we are ready for the challenge. We saw in the last events how our performances were close to those of our main competitors; it will be important, now more than ever, to maximize the performance of every single lap on the track and be ready to make the most of every opportunity. In this way, we will be able to take a step forward and turn our season around”.

Zhou’s words

“It’s nice to be back in Canada: it’s a place that usually hosts good races and it’s a lot of fun even from inside the cockpit“, these are Zhou’s words. “It’s one of the classic races on the calendar and I enjoy the challenge of a track that hasn’t changed much since it was built. I can’t wait to start the weekend ahead. There’s no denying that things have been bad recently, but the team is motivated and we used the days after returning from Munich to analyze what went wrong”.