Why Alfa Romeo was close to Ferrari in terms of performance in Mexico City

The performance of Alfa Romeo in the qualifying session for the 2022 Mexican Grand Prix caught everybody’s attention, especially when compared to that of Scuderia Ferrari. The performance of the F1-75 cars was undoubtedly disappointing, dictated by various factors including a huge limitation (about 15 HP) of the power unit due to overheating problems that could arise in the turbocharger system.

A clearly bad weekend for the Maranello team, also accentuated by a far from ideal preparation work ahead of the Mexican Grand Prix race weekend, which instead saw Alfa Romeo impress in qualifying, only to lose out in the race due to incorrect strategic choices, such as having used the hard tires, similar to what Mercedes did and lost out to Red Bull in the duel for the race win.

Only Zhou Guanyu was able to take advantage of the Soft compound, which proved to be much more suitable than Hards at the 4.304-kilometre Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico City. However, the Chinese driver, thirteenth at the finish line, was never in the race for points: “I sacrificed myself to slow down my opponents and help Valtteri” he then made it known at the end of the Mexican Grand prix.

The sudden small gap between the Alfa Romeo C42 to the Ferrari F1-75 in terms of pace was due to a different management of the Power Units over the course of the 2022 Formula 1 season. After the various problems encountered in the first part of the championship, which led Valtteri Bottas to use seven turbochargers and seven MGU-H parts, the team based in Hinwil decided to compromise and run the rest of the season with less performance from the Italian engine, but managing to reach the finish line. This allowed Alfa Romeo not to have to limit its power during the Mexico weekend according to F1 journalists Paolo D’Alessandro & Piergiuseppe Donadoni for formu1a.uno, thus leading to an evenly matched performance in qualifying against the F1-75 cars, with Valtteri Bottas even ahead of Charles Leclerc on the starting grid for the Mexico City Grand Prix.

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