Alfa Romeo chases Williams for seventh spot

Things are rumbling in the lower reaches of the Formula One Constructors' Championship rankings. Three teams can still grab seventh place: Williams, Alfa Romeo and Haas. Williams currently holds the coveted spot with 23 points. Its immediate challenger is Alfa Romeo, which has scored 16 points this year and is eighth. Below that, we find Haas in ninth place with 12 points.

Alfa Romeo has serious plans to knock Williams out of seventh place. At the Formula One press conference in Qatar, both Alfa Romeo drivers spoke about the battle with the British team. Valtteri Bottas was asked if he thought seventh place was still within reach for Alfa Romeo. The mustachioed F1 driver thought so: "Definitely, we closed the gap a little bit so I feel like we’ve definitely made some progress now and finally I understand 100% the upgrades. Of course the next race is quite a different track again, but it seems like we're definitely a bit more competitive this weekend than the other weekends.."

Zhou is less confident

His teammate Zhou Guanyu also spoke positively about the Italian team's chances, but with a touch of realism and a pinch of self-criticism: "I feel like it’s still quite far to catch them [Williams], but I think this is just a very good, let's say, target for us to reach now, but still I think purely on race craft we're better than Haas, and we finally caught them and overtook them, but we need to improve on Saturday. It's been a messy one, the last three events for me, so if I clear that up, we’ll have more opportunities."

Also battle among themselves

By the way, in the battle between Bottas and Zhou, it does not make much difference between them. The Finnish driver is in 14th place with 10 points and the Chinese driver is two spots lower with six points. So, with five races to go, the competition between them is still open. At Williams, the differences are much bigger. The only points leader there is Thai driver Alexander Albon, in 13th place with 23 points. His American teammate Logan Sargeant is in a lonely 20th place with zero points.

The battle for seventh place in the Formula One constructors' championship is especially important for pennies. According to the latest Concorde Agreement, signed by all teams in 2021, the top team receives 14% of the total prize pool, while the bottom team receives 6% of it. So the rest is in between.