Alfa Romeo believe they are not alone in new Formula One car’s starting problems – other teams affected with similar powertrain problems
The Alfa Romeo team has had major problems with race starts in the first two races of the new Formula One season. At times, drivers Valtteri Bottas and Guanyu Zhou are still struggling with clutch vibrations, resulting in inconsistent starts.
According to Jan Monchaux, the technical director at Alfa Romeo, however, a solution to the problem is not easy to find as it is triggered by a variety of factors with the new car.
“It seems that a lot of teams, apart from maybe two or three, are struggling with drivetrain oscillation at the start at the moment. So it’s not just us,” he explains.
Drivers have to live with problem for now
“When the cars are behind each other you can see that they all vibrate a bit,” says Monchaux, who doesn’t believe the issue will be resolved quickly. “I think just because it’s the drivetrain, it could be related to the stiffness, the weight, the new tyres and the position of the clutch of the new car.”
According to the Alfa Romeo technical director, however, there are ways to live with the problem: “We could get decent starts even with these vibrations, it’s just that the driver has to be much gentler with the throttle and clutch than he normally would. “
The drivers still seem to have some problems with this, however. At the Bahrain Grand Prix, Bottas slipped from sixth to fourteenth on the opening lap, while his teammate Zhou even dropped to the back of the field from twelfth a week later in Saudi Arabia.
No more weight advantage from Barcelona onwards
Despite all the starting problems, the team from Hinwil is buoyed by the performance of the new car, as it currently ranks among the top of the midfield alongside Haas and Alpine. Bottas qualified for Q3 on both race weekends and recorded his best team result since Brazil 2019 with a sixth-place finish in Bahrain.
The team is undoubtedly helped by the fact that their car is close to the minimum weight limit, but Monchaux is not about to rest on that advantage. “I can’t say anything about the others, but I hear a lot of people complaining that they are overweight,” he says.
“We don’t have those problems at the moment and it definitely helps us because more weight makes you significantly slower. It certainly helps us in terms of tyre management as well. We’re not talking about 100 kilograms of difference here, but for us it’s an advantage at the moment. “
“But I think by Barcelona at the latest, most teams will have recovered from this, so we can’t just rest on it and say, ‘Bravo, we’ve done our homework’ because the others will catch up,” he adds.
Aside from the obvious benefits of lower weight, Alfa Romeo can put more focus in the factory on developing the car aerodynamically, rather than on how to save weight. According to Monchaux, this would be “quite a complicated issue during the season”.
“It’s also a lot expensive. Against the background of the budget cap, it is obviously better not to have to spend a fortune to save three, four, five or ten kilograms. That would be incredibly painful,” he explains.
