“We expect to fight in the upper midfield”, Alfa Romeo fires “warning shots” towards Alpine and McLaren ahead of Silverstone GP » FirstSportz

Alfa Romeo has been hot and cold this season and due to the unpredictability of their performances they currently sit 6th behind Alpine and McLaren in the Constructors Championship.

Alfa Romeo, like its sister team Ferrari, has had reliability issues this season and as a result has not been able to consistently perform well.

In addition, it was recently revealed that the Hinwil-based team was running older specifications at past races on Fridays due to the unavailability of spare parts.

Now, after 9 races into the season, the team has finally caught up in terms of spares production, announcing that for the Silverstone Grand Prix they will have the latest specifications for their two cars on all three days.

Speaking about the current state of affairs in the team, Xevi Pujolar, Head of Trackside Engineering at Alfa Romeo said: “On Fridays we are still having some reliability issues and we are working to improve them.”

“But also in terms of performance on Friday, we ran older packages on Friday. From the next race we will be able to do the same package all weekend, then everything will be easier.”

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The Alfa Romeo engineer on the lack of spare parts this season

Xevi Pujolar believes the team’s plans were thrown off balance when they crashed early in the season, pointing to Zhou’s crash at Imola as an example, which diverted resources at their factory.

“We had some incidents early in the season,” he said. “Then you just have to catch up on all the production of spares from the packs we run and have production of the new packs in parallel, which was something that was the constraint. Now, from Silverstone onwards, we’re already in a good position.”

“We also took some margin with us. Circuits like Baku, also Montreal and Monaco, when you are close to the walls, we wanted to make sure that if we have damage on Friday, we don’t want to pay any consequences later. But now things are getting better, at least for the next races.”

“Alfa Romeo has shown impressive pace at times this season and Pujolar says it aims to battle right at the front of the chase behind Red Bull and Ferrari at Silverstone.”

“I think we can expect to fight at the top of midfield but we’ll have to see,” he explained.

“I don’t know if some teams will bring some [upgrade] Packages to Silverstone, but so far I’d say we’ve been pretty consistent across all tracks – so different types of tracks and also different types of aero efficiency.”

“For the next few races we expect to battle with Alpine and McLaren at the top of the midfield and see if we can get more points and double points. That’s our goal.”

“We’re in a position where we want to be in Q3 with both cars and if that’s the case then we can have solid races against Alpine first.”

After taking a look at what their race engineer has said, the team seems poised to fight it off at Silverstone and as they will be working at their best level, the Alfa Romeo team could potentially throw a surprise in store for the teams no good news would be like McLaren and Alpine.

How do you think the team will fare at Silverstone considering they have the super fast Valtteri Bottas in their ranks?

Also read: “We need to control our expectations,” Toto Wolff urges fans not to have “huge expectations” ahead of the Silverstone GP