The nightmare of pit stops
While waiting for the Japanese Grand Prix, three teams are still without points in the Constructors' standings after three races held: Alpine, Williams and Kick Sauber. The latter, in reality, had concrete opportunities to be able to finish in the top-10 at least once with one of the two drivers, Valtteri Bottas or Zhou Guanyubut the mission has always failed for problems occurred on more than one occasion in the pits.
The seconds lost by Bottas
To ruin the drivers' races, and in particular those of Bottas over two weekends, there were difficulties in the tire change. On both occasions, in Bahrain and Melbourne, the problem occurred with a nut, which eliminated any chance for the former Mercedes to reach the points zone due to the long wait before the restart. When the episode repeated itself in Australia, the first to apologize to the driver was the team principal Alessandro Alunni Well donedoing so with a radio team shortly after the pit stop.
Apologies from the team principal
Interviewed by Autosport, the Umbrian manager wanted to underline the team's values and his regret for what happened with Bottas: “In three races we had three pitstop problems, two with Valtteri – he has declared – .for me it is important that when we have a problem we show our riders that we are united and that we work together. We always say that we win or lose together, but in this situation it is even more important. Valtteri had a good race. We want him to be fully motivated in all the Grands Prix, and I think it was the minimum thing for us to apologize. As I told the whole team, we have to take responsibility when things aren't going in the right direction and work together to improve. I want to say we come back with some positives. Of course, everything was compromised by these problems. We have to work hard, because this was another missed opportunity.”
In Japan to move on
Returning to the last Australian GP, Alunni Bravi also commented on Bottas' performance, which he said was very positive until the tire change: “Valtteri showed he had the pace to fight with Alonso at the start of the race, and he had the same pace as Tsunoda – he underlined – this is the positive thing we can take from the race. Regarding tire degradation, we had a very good first stint. We cannot consider the second, because Valtteri was lapped at that moment after the pit stop and therefore the blue flags obviously affected his consistency. So We know we have this problem and are working to resolve it. It's very painful for the whole team because both in terms of the performance of the car and the performance over the weekend, from qualifying to the race, we were stronger and we will also be at Suzuka“.
#students #problems #working #solve
