Alfa Romeo’s Valtteri Bottas claims his biggest concern at the moment is being able to drive a full-race distance

Valtteri Bottas is a tad worried about Alfa Romeo’s prospects heading into the 2022 Bahrain Grand Prix. Despite seeing the team improve during the latest round of pre-season testing, the Finn is yet to find confidence in his team being able to finish a race.

Reliability issues plagued Frédéric Vasseur’s team during their shakedowns in Barcelona and Bahrain. Bottas is aware that these could end up being an Achilles Heel for Alfa Romeo. When asked about his chances for the season opener during a media interaction, the 32-year-old said:

“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. 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.”

Valtteri Bottas pleased to see Alfa Romeo take clear step from 2021 car this season

Valtteri Bottas was upbeat about the new Alfa Romeo C42 being better than its predecessor from 2021.

Bottas moved to Alfa Romeo after five seasons with Mercedes alongside Lewis Hamilton. He went on to talk about the positives they were taking away from testing by saying:

“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. 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 solid long runs and not a bad feeling. I was really starting to like the car, both high fuel and a little bit lower fuel. It felt pretty decent. Of course, I would have liked to have more laps, but I’m ready. But we need to make sure we learn from the mistakes and issues. That’s the number one thing, as I said, we will have few practice sessions to fine-tune the balance next week.”

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Meanwhile, the 2022 F1 season will get underway on Sunday, March 20, at the Sakhir Circuit.