© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Valtteri Bottas says he could have looked like “a fool” to people who are not familiar with Formula 1, after his performance against George Russell at the Sakhir Grand Prix.
George Russell, who was a stand-in for Lewis Hamilton at the Sakhir Grand Prix, drove superbly and even outperformed Mercedes’ regular driver Valtteri Bottas. However, the Finn says he might have looked bad against Russell, but only to those who are not familiar with the nuances of Formula 1.
“If you don’t know things, I might have looked like a complete c***, a fool, so that’s not nice,” said Bottas after the race.
“But the people who know, they know how the performance [was] and how the end result could have been.
“It was a pretty bad race for me from that side and it will be very easy for people to say that a new guy comes in and beats the guy who has been in the team a few years, so it was not ideal.
“I knew that in the first stint with the medium tyre that the track position would be important, so obviously it was unfortunate to lose that, but in the second stint I was catching him at a pretty decent rate
“I knew everything was still going to be open and that most likely we were going to have a good battle. He obviously did a mistake-free race, but I still knew there would be everything to play for.
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“I was confident, based on what I felt with the hard tyre, the car was more complete balance-wise. I knew there was going to be other opportunities and that was ultimately the plan for me, to get him, and it was getting close.
“The race was not finished when we had the thing with the pit stops, which changed everything.
“I managed to go a bit longer on the medium tyre and that would have opened up opportunities for me. I was catching him.”
However the mix-up during the fateful pit stop that left Russell with Bottas’ tyres and Bottas on his old rubber completely destroyed Bottas’ race, while Russell still managed to rebound, after he had another pit stop to switch to the right tyres. Well, at least up until he had a tyre puncture.
“It’s hard to explain the feeling when you come to a pit stop and you leave the pit stop with the same old tyres that you came in with and then lose positions,” continued the Finn.
“Obviously a big mistake from the team that will be analysed and learned from. It was a nightmare being on the old tyres that had lost temperature. I was like a sitting duck.
“It was a real nightmare situation.”
