Valtteri Bottas is confident Alfa Romeo has “stepped up as a team” in 2023 and can field a more competitive car than last season.

Alfa Romeo finished sixth in the constructors’ championship in 2022, with Bottas in particular enjoying an impressive first part of the season that resulted in three top-six finishes from the opening six rounds. Off the back of an impressive week of testing that culminated in Bottas setting the third-fastest overall time on the final day, the Finn says the progress made over the winter is noticeable.

“I feel like we’ve stepped up as a team, in terms of the quality of the car,” Bottas said. “We’ve also had fewer issues than in testing last year and overall the car feels better than last year’s. So, hopefully that will be the case.

“It’s just testing. I don’t know how much fuel the others had, plus many other things, but at least it looked like we are not at the back of the grid, so that’s good to see! The main thing is the feeling with the car — I could feel we got the improvements we were trying to get for this year. The stability of the car is much better, and that way we gain much more confidence in the car.”

Although Bottas started 2022 with a sixth place in Bahrain, he believes Alfa Romeo is in a much stronger place this time around after the pre-season running it has completed, but also as a result of his own experience from 12 months ago.

“For sure there’s still some fine-tuning to do but nothing huge,” he said. “I think we’re pretty well prepared and I’m definitively more confident than last year, because last year’s testing wasn’t too much fun! I feel we are in a good place after the test.

“It’s always easier to approach a second season with a team, because you can skip all the process of learning how the team works, the people work and just focus on the job.”