Bottas hoping for dry race

Editor 23 Aug 2014 4:33 PM

Valtteri Bottas insists Williams are not too disappointed with their qualifying positions at Spa and feels they can make up places on Sunday if it’s a dry race.

The Finn set the pace during Free Practice Three on Saturday morning, but the Grove squad were not at their best during wet conditions in qualifying.

Mercedes once again locked out the front row of the grid and Bottas could only manage the sixth fastest time. He will start behind the Red Bull cars of Sebastian Vettel and Daniel Ricciardo as well as Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari while his Williams team-mate Felipe Massa qualified P9.

Despite their lowly grid positions, Bottas feels they can challenge Red Bull and Ferrari if conditions play into their hands.

“The final practice where I finished P1 showed that we have a very strong car in the dry, but wet conditions allow other cars to move closer to us and unfortunately we didn’t qualify as high today as we can,” he said. “I lost some tyre temperature in my warm up lap because of traffic which is crucial for us and this made my final run trickier than the ones before, and throughout qualifying we were losing time in the second sector.

“Our wet pace has improved a lot though since the beginning of the season and P6 is still a good grid slot. We can still do a lot tomorrow and if it is a dry race then we stand a good chance of challenging Ferrari and Red Bull.”

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