F1 | Sakhir GP | Bottas: "It Was Tricky For Me"
Mercedes AMG driver, Valtteri Bottas reflects on what was one of his worst practice performance
Valtteri bottas was unable to get within three-tenths of his team mate in FP1- and on paper, his FP2 performance was even worse, the Finn ended up in P11, and the shorter circuit configuration was not looking entirely at ease.
Bottas would be confident of turning the situation around on Saturday, with the P11 time set on the hard tyres early in the session, having surpassed track limits at Turn 8 on his two qualifying simulation laps and either aborted the laps or had them removed.
The Mercedes driver comments,"It was a tricky day for me. I went over the kerbs in Turn 8 in my first run in FP1 and broke quite a large chunk off the floor, so the rest of the session was a bit of a waste afterwards. FP2 felt ok, but obviously I didn't really get any laps in on the Soft tyre, as my only half decent lap was deleted because of track limits."
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He adds, "So, not the best day, but the long runs were pretty consistent. Red Bull look really competitive on those long runs, particularly on the Medium tyre, and George was putting in good laps as well. There's quite a bit of work to do on my side to get everything together for qualifying."
To continue, "The new section of track is really technical and bumpy, so it's quite challenging and really easy to lose a tenth. On such a short track, in qualifying that could make all the difference. It's going to be intense with so many cars on track, too, so it's going to be really important to get clean laps in and prioritise the gaps."
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Bottas hasn't really shown his true pace yet, and with FP2 having given us a sense of how frentic qualifying might be in Bahrain it's still very much everything to play for.
