Bottas issues Alfa Romeo 2023 demand

Valtteri Bottas has urged Alfa Romeo to believe in its ability to consistently fight for points in F1 after results tailed off over the second half of the past season.

The Finn enjoyed a strong start to the campaign after joining from then constructors' champions Mercedes, scoring 46 of his 49-point haul in the first nine races.

Bottas' best result was fifth in the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix at Imola which proved to be pivotal to Alfa Romeo as it secured the team sixth in the constructors' standings after it finished tied on points with Aston Martin.

But as other teams were able to address their problems, Alfa Romeo lagged behind until an update that was introduced in Mexico allowed the 33-year-old to return to the points in two of the last three races following a 10-event drought.

Speaking in an end-of-season interview with GPFans, Bottas said: “In this sport, and as a driver, you always think we should have got more. That's the feeling.

“But still, if I take a step back and think about the expectations last year for this year, I think we'd still take it.

“With that feeling we got at the beginning of the year, consistently scoring, sometimes even sixth place, fifth place, you definitely miss that kind of performance.

“But it was really important for the team to feel that, at the beginning of the year, that ‘Yes, we can do it. We can be consistently there’.

“Mexico was positive in terms of the performance but before that, it was like everyone definitely missed that feeling of being in the points all the time.

"So the team is really hungry to get back to that, so that's good.”

Additional reporting by Sam Hall