As far as focus scored, Valtteri Bottas annihilated his new kid on the block Alfa Romeo Recipe 1 colleague Zhou Guanyu in 2022. However, the edge of his ‘triumph’, 49 focuses to six, lays out a deceptive picture. While Bottas was definitively the more grounded driver, Zhou’s mission was superior to the outcomes proposed.
That is somewhat down to the direction of Alfa Romeo’s season. A solid beginning, a pained and unproductive center, and a late, yet generally unrewarded, recovery implied Zhou didn’t get the focuses that he justified. However, Bottas had the option to make roughage in the beginning phases of the time when he was a Q3 customary and piled up the vast majority of his places.
Bottas was by and large the speedier of the Alfa Romeo drivers, with a typical benefit of 0.281s in dry circumstances in qualifying from meetings where a fair correlation can be made. In any case, Zhou did close the hole as the season advanced.
Bottas was renewed by his takeoff from Mercedes having had enough of being the helping act in a major group and delighted in being the principal man at a group with long-haul desires to work its direction towards the front. However, he didn’t move toward it with the pompous strut of a major name who had dipped under his station, or as an old stager capitalizing on one final huge payday.
That implied the group got the best possible deal from a willing driver to invest the energy to assist it with getting to the next level. Surprisingly, in his tenth season in F1, this was whenever Bottas first has been the more experienced hand in a group’s line-up.
“I have delighted in it,” expressed Bottas of his position of authority. “It was regular the way in which this present circumstance came up on the grounds that I’m not a newbie any longer, yet it’s unnerving the way that time passes quickly by!
“I knew that eventually, reality would eventually show that I would be the more experienced driver in a group, however, I truly partook in the obligation of that, the power that accompanied it.”
Bottas likewise adjusted no sweat to the requests of the 2022 determination vehicles. That joined with a Sauber-delivered machine that was a cutthroat midfielder toward the beginning of the year – somewhat because of being on as far as possible – permitted him to pile up a series of focus wraps up. In the initial nine grand Prix, he scored multiple times, just passing up a major opportunity in Saudi Arabia because of overheating issues and in Azerbaijan with suspension inconveniences that cursed his end of the week.
During this period, Zhou battled both for speed and results. He and the group set a reasonable, calculated focus of coming to Q2 reliably while depending on Bottas to give the top 10s, and for the most part, the holes were enormous during this period of the time – the special case being Miami where he was inside two-tenths.
His battles to get the vehicle off the line didn’t help, and positions lost, or chances to acquire wasted, were an element of Zhou’s season.