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Vasseur challenges Alfa Romeo to be more consistent in 2020
Alfa Romeo needs to find more consistency this season and avoid the big performance swings it saw in 2019, according to team principal Frederic Vasseur.
The Sauber-run team started last season strongly and was often in the mix at the front of the midfield, where Kimi Raikkonen finished in the top eight in five of the first 12 races. But there were also races where the team struggled to pick up points, and its only score in the final six rounds was the excellent 22-point return when both cars finished in the top five in Brazil. Vasseur wants Alfa Romeo to maximize its potential on a more regular basis.
“Now we have to build up next season based on the last one,” Vasseur told RACER. "Last season was far too much up and down, with the downs being very low and the ups being very high. We have to understand exactly what has happened at certain stages when for different reasons we were out of – I don’t want to say out of the pace, but sometimes it was just out of the results and the points and the pace was there.
“We have to sit down and really think about it because overall performance was OK but we still had too many missed opportunities during the season.”
If the inconsistency is a source of frustration for Vasseur, he doesn’t want it to completely overshadow the more positive aspects of the team’s season, seeing a much more competitive car on the whole than it had in the previous year.
“I think that we made a good step forward compared to 2018 in terms of general performance. It’s clear, it was something like 4.5% but perhaps it’s not enough. We want to get more, but one thing is the pace, the other one is the points. Let’s see I think it’s a good base for 2020.”
But when pushed on whether Alfa Romeo will be developing a 2020 car as an evolution of the previous one, Vasseur added: “We will do a completely new car, a completely new (concept).”
Chris Medland
While studying Sports Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, Chris managed to talk his way into working at the British Grand Prix in 2008 and was retained for three years before joining ESPN F1 as Assistant Editor. After three further years at ESPN, a spell as F1 Editor at Crash Media Group was followed by the major task of launching F1i.com’s English-language website and running it as Editor. Present at every race since the start of 2014, he has continued building his freelance portfolio, working with international titles. As well as writing for RACER, his broadcast work includes television appearances on F1 TV and as a presenter and reporter on North America's live radio coverage on SiriusXM.
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