No points for Alfa Romeo in Hungary, as Valtteri Bottas became the only race retiree when he pulled over late on with an apparent loss of power. The Finn was only running 12th when his race ended sooner than planned so while the failure may not have cost him points, the result was still a disappointing way to end the first half of the season.
“A few laps before the end I had to stop the car because of a technical issue, which was a shame,” he said. “I just lost power, we do not know the details yet. Obviously it’s unfortunate and we will investigate it with the team, but I still think points seemed quite unlikely.”
Alfa had been trying an ambitious one-stop strategy for both their drivers, with both Bottas and Zhou Guanyu starting on the medium, running a long first stint and then pitting for the hard C2 rubber. In hindsight, it was the wrong strategy, but the team weren’t the only ones to try it with Alpine also attempting to one-stop their way to the finish.
“We committed to one-stop with the medium hard, and towards the end of the race I felt it didn’t work as planned. But we tried, it was tricky to back off and I think the hard tyre didn’t work quite as well as I thought it should,” said Bottas. “[We’re] not consistent enough and we know it, we need to keep working on that. It would be an even greater shame if we were to [be in the] points again and had an issue.”