Bottas ‘has no explanation’ for lack of F1 pace in Portuguese GP
Bottas made a strong start from pole position, maintaining the lead over teammate Lewis Hamilton.
The Finn kept the lead after the brief Safety Car period, extending his gap to Hamilton, who had dropped behind Max Verstappen on the restart.
Once Hamilton had overtaken Verstappen on Lap 11, Bottas didn’t have enough pace to resist his Mercedes teammate, surrendering the lead into Turn 1 on Lap 20.
Reflecting on the opening stint of the race, Bottas said in the post-race press conference: “Disappointing. When you start from pole position there’s only one target for the race and that is to win the race and that didn’t happen today, so I’m disappointed.
“I don’t really know why in the first stint I didn’t have the pace, it felt like everything, in terms of race start and restart was good from our side but I could see quite quickly in the race that we just didn’t have the pace, like Lewis and Max had and I don’t really have an explanation.”
Bottas struggled for tyre warm-up when he switched to the hard tyre, dropping to third behind Verstappen.
Once his tyres were up to temperature, Bottas showed impressive pace to reduce the gap to Verstappen to just 1.1s.
His chances of second place were thwarted when he encountered an exhaust temperature sensor issue, resulting in him dropping to over five seconds behind the Dutchman as he suffered from a lack of power.
“It was better on the hard tyre, at some point I was catching Max and then I had an issue with one sensor, I started to lose power and lost about five seconds to Max and that was it,” Bottas added.
“It was pretty bad [on the first lap on the hards], we knew that our warm-up of tyres was pretty tricky but afterwards, once we got heat into the tyres, it was actually not bad and better than with the mediums.
“We’ve got lots of things to look at, to analyze and to learn for me in the next three days before we start focusing on the next race.”
Bottas managed to secure the fastest lap after a late pit stop for softs, inheriting the extra point after Verstappen’s fastest lap effort was deleted for exceeding track limits at Turn 14.
