Last year the Alfa-badged C42 was on occasion a strong ‘best of the rest’ contender behind the big three teams. It was the only car which began the season on the minimum weight limit and so got off to a strong start. As others went on weight-saving programmes, so that competitiveness tailed off. This year’s C43 hasn’t even had that advantage. It’s not a bad car; doesn’t do anything particularly poorly, is just a little off everywhere. It’s decently competitive on slow corners (so long as they are not bumpy) and fares well relative to those around it when conditions are hot, as it has good tyre usage. But it appears to be aerodynamically inefficient.
Valtteri Bottas has been very diplomatic but reading between the lines of his words, he’s disappointed there has been no expansion made and that the team’s small size has limited the car’s development. But when it was suggested that, ‘Audi will be very competitive in ’26’, his reply of, “That’s the rumour,” suggests he needs some convincing yet. Not that he will necessarily still be there then, for his contract runs only to the end of ’25.
Keeping is thoughts to himself; Bottas has seen rival teams outpace Alfa development
Sauber
But while Audi’s run-up may be less than ideal, there’s at least hope of the C43’s form improving in the last few races of this season. A major aerodynamic upgrade was brought to Singapore and while it didn’t make much difference to the car’s competitiveness there, in Japan there was promise in practice, though it was not fulfilled in qualifying, as trackside engineering chief Xevi Pujolar outlined: “In FP3, we looked pretty strong. We thought we had potential for at least Q2, maybe if everything went well even Q3. But everything is very, very tight and we could see there was potential to be knocked out in Q1 as well [which is what happened]. In the Q1 second run Valtteri could not match his FP3 performance in sector 1, lost time through the Esses, then Zhou Guanyu had a mistake in Turn 9 and that was it. The potential was there easily if we’d put it together.” In the Friday long runs, Bottas had been quite impressive too.
So watch out for it this weekend around Qatar’s Losail track which features similar sort of high-speed corners to those of Suzuka. But perhaps don’t expect too much of Audi’s early days a couple of years down the line.