Valtteri Bottas says the progress made with his car’s set-up is what allowed him to beat his team-mate Lewis Hamilton in qualifying.
“I think set-up wise we made good steps from last weekend, that’s why I think the qualifying performance for me was better than last weekend,” explained Bottas.
“In terms of set-up, at least for me driving wise, we’ve been able to find a bit more, as the same process got better throughout the weekend.
“Of course I cannot go into too much details in terms of what we did set-up wise, but we’ve been able to improve the car’s set-up for me.
“I think I had a slight deficit in qualifying last weekend, just in terms of the direction I want last weekend.
“I don’t think it was a bad race car, but I hope now it’s optimised for both. As always between the races, we analyse everything from the race weekend, the set-up, my driving in qualifying and the race, and I drove a bit better.
“At least today I managed to some things better than I did last weekend. It’s a pretty standard process, to be honest, I just don’t want to go into the details about the set-up, but it just that it felt better today in qualifying than last weekend.”
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The Finn didn’t hide his satisfaction with today’s result.
“It’s a very good feeling to be on pole, I love the qualifying and especially here, in Silverstone, it’s pretty good fun.
“The feeling was, from the practice sessions, that the Mediums could be even faster than the Soft tyre, that’s why in Q2, when we had both compounds, I knew there were still going to be good opportunities to improve on the second Q3 run.
“In the first run I knew there were some things missing and I could find more. There was no one key place, it was more about getting a clean lap, putting the sectors together.
“It was a good lap, no doubt, so a good feeling,” concluded Bottas.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff is also satisfied with the result.
“The result is great,“ the Austrian told Sky Sports F1.
“We are one second ahead of the rest of the world, but you still have to stay humble. We saw what happened in the last race.
“It is good for our balance in the team that Valtteri is at the front. That was also a great round, he deserves it.“