F1 mid-season review: Alfa Romeo treading water awaiting Audi

Alfa Romeo won't be known as such next year, with the Italian carmaker seemingly taking its branding elsewhere as Audi ramp up investment in the team formerly known as Sauber, ahead of a full takeover of the Swiss-based outfit in 2026.

Alfa scored 55 points last year to finish an encouraging sixth in the Constructors' Championship.

However, 51 of those points came in the first nine races of the year, during which Alfa were one of the few teams to be hitting the minimum weight limit.

As the season wore on, other teams managed to shed excess weight from their cars, and the Hinwil concern gradually slipped back into the lower reaches of the grid, where they have more or less remained in 2023, with just nine points from the first 12 Grands Prix.

Alfa-Sauber seem to be treading water a little this year as they await increased investment from Audi. Will that help push the team up into the midfield?

Valtteri Bottas

Freed from the corporate straight-jacket of Mercedes, Bottas has seemed more at home in the less pressurised surroundings of Alfa Romeo, with his mullet and moustache combo attesting to a man at ease with himself.

That's probably just as well, as there hasn't been a great deal to crow about in the first half of a largely forgettable 2023 - though that should be levelled less at Bottas and more at the recalcitrant C43 - and the Finn seems to have accepted that he won't be adding to his tally of ten Grand Prix wins.

There is no doubt that Bottas' experience remains useful to the team, and with the security of a three-year deal signed in 2021, the Finn will definitely be around next year as the gradual metamorphosis into Audi draws on apace.

Zhou Guanyu

After understandably trailing Bottas by a hefty points margin in his freshman F1 year, Zhou is at least a lot closer to his more experienced teammate in 2023, with four points to Bottas' five.

Notable highlights included the Spanish Grand Prix, where Zhou rose from 13th on the grid to finish ninth in what was probably his most impressive F1 performance.

The Chinese also turned heads in Qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix, sticking his Alfa in a career-best fifth on the grid, two places ahead of Bottas.

Alas for Zhou, a brake problem triggered a slow start and, perhaps distracted, the Chinese blotted his copybook by rear-ending Daniel Ricciardo, ruining his hopes of a points finish.

Zhou's current contract is up at the end of 2023, and while he clearly isn't out of his depth in F1, there remains a sense that he is unlikely to rise beyond the massed ranks of the sport's journeymen.

But with the Chinese Grand Prix set to return for 2024, Zhou's future at Alfa-Sauber-Audi may depend on how useful his presence continues to be from a marketing point of view.

Audi's parent company Volkswagen sell 50% of their cars in China alone, and that sort of bottom line may be enough to encourage Hinwil and Neuburg to keep Zhou into 2026.