Monaco Grand Prix – Valtteri Bottas was looking to get Mercedes’ weekend back on track before Leclerc’s red flag ended his pole hopes.
After taking three poles and three wins in the four races so far this season, Mercedes have struggled so far in the Monaco weekend with both Bottas and Lewis Hamilton off the pace and not looking as comfortable as you would expect from the team who’ve taken ten trophies home from the Principality in the last eight visits.
Bottas has had more pace than his teammate and was looking competitive during qualifying alongside Verstappen and the Ferraris. Heading into the final run of the session the Finn was sitting in provisional third, 0.255 off pole, and had just put in a personal best first sector before Charles Leclerc went into the barriers and brought qualifying to a premature end.
“Disappointing I didn’t get my last run with the red flag,” said Bottas. “That’s how it is sometimes but I kind of left everything out there for the last run. The first run wasn’t really enough for pole but in the second run, with the prep lap that we did, was feeling good. I was quite a bit down on my lap time so I’m gutted.”
The Mercedes driver said that the team don’t have any big issues holding them back but given how close the field is this year, the little things do make a difference.
“We’ve seen since the practice on Thursday and still this morning that our relative performance to Red Bull and also Ferrari is not quite what it had been in the recent races but it’s a unique track, different characteristics from the car.
“We struggled a bit with the tyre warm up and in the end decided to go for prep lap and then timed lap, and that felt to be the best and ultimately I couldn’t try that in the end. But I’d say tyre warm up is the biggest issue we have and still balance wise a bit of understeer in sector 2. It’s not big things but the gaps are small and small things matter.”
The Finn praised the work that has been done through the sessions to make the car more drivable and competitive.
“What I’m proud of is the progress we’ve managed to make. By qualifying the car was feeling a lot better than it did in practice and even since this morning I was more comfortable with the car. Actually I really felt that there was a shot for pole position, which was completely out of reach in practice, that’s why it was disappointing at the end with the red flag because I felt there was a good lap on the way.”
Looking ahead to tomorrow’s Grand Prix, Bottas believes that Mercedes do have a better race car than qualifying car for Monaco but all they can do is wait and see how things play out.
“I think we have a good race car, not that it helps here if there’s a train, we’ll see. We’ll try everything we can tomorrow at the race, it’s Monaco anything can happen.”
