Mercedes lost the dominance at the US Grand Prix, after a superb performance by Red Bull. The weekend of the team from Brackley was also again compromised by a PU penalty, that Valtteri Bottas had to face.

The Finnish driver does not feel happy and satisfied with his performance and overall the weekend his team had.

Soon after the race in fact, he commented: “It was a difficult race as I expected it to be. Especially in the first stint, I was behind the AlphaTauri and it was very difficult to get by and this made me lose a bit of time. Unfortunately there was no help from safety cars today so, it was even harder.”

On taking another  PU penalty this season he said: “I hope we are done for now. Like I said yesterday, we haven’t detected any other issue in my engine components, so I really hope I can go until the end of the season with this one and hopefully avoid another penalty that would really compromise our Championship battle. Also being put down five positions can be risky for the championship at this point of the season.”

Bottas had to face many more penalties than his teammate, the 7-times world champion Lewis Hamilton, and about this he said: “I’ve been a bit unlucky; before the fifth engine, all the others before that passed the test, they didn’t have particular problems. Yes, luck was not by my side in this case, I had more failures than Lewis. Hopefully now I won’t have any other particular problem, but only time will show.”

On the battle with Red Bull, which seems it will last until the end of the season: “I think it’s going to be tough. Red Bull has been significantly consistent through the season, and their power unit works so well. Not expecting this weekend to be beaten like this, but we’ll try to gain as many point as possible from them until the end.”

He concluded that “they performed a little bit better than we expected this weekend. Race pace was not that much different as we expected but I think they managed to find a bit more from Friday to Saturday compared to us.”