From eleventh on the grid, the Italian drove a great first lap, avoided incidents and moved up to sixth place.
After the restart, he lost one place to Carlos Sainz, but was still in a strong seventh place ahead of Sebastian Vettel when he was called for an early pit stop on lap 16 after reporting that he was struggling with his rear tires.
As expected by the team, he appeared behind Daniel Ricciardo and Valtteri Bottas.
But then he got stuck behind them until their stops much later in the race and so could not take full advantage of his new tires.
Alfa admitted it miscalculated Ricciardo and Bottas’ pace, believing they would get faster after Lance Stroll, who had run ahead of them, made his early stop.
After crossing the line on the 11th, Giovinazzi offered a sarcastic “Hey guys, thanks for the great strategy” on the radio.
Although his teammate Kimi Raikkonen finished eighth, the points lost could prove crucial to Alfa’s battle for eighth in the championship with Williams as Giovinazzi seeks to save his F1 career, with his seat likely to go to Guanyu Zhou will.
“I’m just very disappointed because today we had the chance to score points with two cars,” he said.
“But on my side the strategy was completely wrong. We pitted too early, but I don’t think that was the problem. The problem was that I was in traffic when I got out. And the strategy didn’t work works. So, yeah, just really disappointed.
“I think today if Kimi [Raikkonen] stayed P8 and at that moment I was P7, which was disappointing because the team didn’t score as many goals as possible. And that’s also very difficult for me. But it is so.
“It was just a great first lap, but in the end it didn’t affect my bottom line. So a good first lap, just disappointed with the situation.
Alfa team boss Fred Vasseur admitted that the Hinwil team had miscalculated.
“It was definitely an overall strong performance from qualifying,” he told Motorsport.com. “We got off to a good start, we avoided the crash, we drove P6 and P9 and then P7 and P9 when Sainz overtook Antonio.
“The pace was okay, but we went with the strategy. We were very surprised by the pace of Ricciardo and Bottas and then we got stuck behind them, which was a bit of a shame because he did a great job. “
“To be honest, the strategy wasn’t stupid at the time, but it didn’t work because we didn’t expect Ricciardo and Bottas to be that slow. At least with Kimi we scored some good points.”
Antonio Giovinazzi, Alfa Romeo Racing C41
Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images
Alfa are now 12 points behind Williams and Vasseur admits his team missed scoring opportunities his rival took advantage of.
“We’ve taken a step forward in terms of performance,” he said. “If the weekends go well, we can get good points. If you look at the season now, we’ve missed too many opportunities.
“I think we were in good shape in Budapest and the crash threw us out of the points and Williams in the points. It was our best qualification of the season and the fall was ahead and we were out with the fall.” It would have been better to start two rows behind like Williams! “
“You can rewrite the story of Spa – I’m not sure [George] Russell would have stayed at P2 and this could have been a good opportunity for us.
“But let’s stay focused. We scored four points in Sochi, four points here, we still have four races ahead of us. Let’s see what can happen.”
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