Bottas ‘paid price’ for losing back-end

Shahida Jacobs
Valtteri Bottas in his Mercedes

Valtteri Bottas in his Mercedes

It wasn’t the best of Fridays for Valtteri Bottas as he crashed in FP1 while in the second session he found himself well off the pace of team-mate Lewis Hamilton.

The Finn’s Singapore Grand Prix weekend didn’t get off to the best of starts as he lost the rear end of his Mercedes and crashed into the barriers at Turn 19 in the morning session.

“It was a tricky one, had a bit of an off moment in FP1 which ended my running a bit early, but I really was feeling OK until then,” he explained to Crash.net.

“I just lost the back-end in one of the corners, and obviously here with no run-offs, you pay the price. It can happen I guess.”

The Merc mechanics had a big repair job on their hand to get him out for the second session, but they got the job done.

However, it was another uncomfortable session for Bottas as he struggled to keep up with Hamilton, who topped the timesheets with a 1:38.773.

The Finn was down in fourth place, 1.121s off the pace, and he admits he was left scratching his head over his lack of pace.

“P2, not sure really what was going on, was lacking pace every single run, every tyre compound, so I’m not quite sure if everything was right in the car,” he said.

“We need to have a look. It felt like I couldn’t go any quicker, but I was one second off the pace. A bit tricky.

“The only thing I could really feel was quite a bit of friction in the steering system, struggled to feel the car properly.

“We’ll look at everything for sure, but I doubt everything was 100 percent. Obviously need to have a look at what I can do better as well.

“For sure you need to push always, and the biggest push in Q3, obviously try and minimise the damage in practice.

“I think it’s going to be close between the three teams, but Lewis was definitely on form today.”

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