Xevi Pulojar believes the McLaren F1 Team and BWT Alpine F1 Team were too far ahead of Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, and even if they had a more reliable car, they would still have finished behind them.
Alfa Romeo had a much-improved 2022 season and finished sixth in the Constructors’ Championship but were a hundred points and four points behind fifth placed McLaren, and a further fourteen points back from Alpine.
The season started promisingly for Alfa Romeo, with Valtteri Bottas scoring points in seven of the first nine races, with Zhou Guanyu scoring twice in the same period. However, the second half of the season was a very different story, with only four more points being scored, three for Bottas and one for Zhou.
However, reliability and retirements cost Alfa Romeo dearly, with both Bottas and Zhou retiring six times (Bottas was classified in the Hungarian Grand Prix despite retiring late on, as was Zhou in France). They had more retirements than any other team on the grid.
Pulojar, the Head of Trackside Engineering at Alfa Romeo, said that whilst the pace of the C42-Ferrari was strong, they did not have the car capable of being either Alpine or McLaren in 2022, although they were not helped by their dreadful reliability issues.