Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsWilliams

Bottas expecting three-way fight with Ferrari, Red Bull

Valtteri Bottas believes it will be a three-way fight between Williams, Ferrari and Red Bull for the final podium position in the Hungarian Grand Prix.

Williams expected to struggle at the Hungaroring more then recent tracks due to the circuit's low speed characteristics, but still manage to qualify with both cars in the top eight. Bottas will start from sixth and he concedes Mercedes is out of reach but is Williams is in the mix for a podium.

"Pace wise I think we are going to be quite close to the Ferrari and Red Bull, so I think it is going to be quite a close race," Bottas said. "But here it is so difficult to overtake, especially if you can’t do anything special with strategy. But we need to be there, we need to have a good start and we need to see if there are any opportunities to move up."

Felipe Massa starts from eighth place but agrees with his team-mate's optimism regarding the potential for Williams to fight higher up the grid.

“Well maybe I expected one or two positions better, but we are not far away from where we are supposed to be in terms of how our car is compared to the others," Massa said. "It’s true that when you see you are third, fighting pretty hard in the race before and then you get here and we are P6 and P8 it is a little bit frustrating, but we know it’s also not the best track for us.

“I even said in Silverstone if we get here and we are very competitive here it means we will have no problems at whatever track we go to. Maybe it is not the case, but I still believe it is a race that we can score good points. It is a race that we can be there in the fight and be strong, be competitive. I think the long run yesterday was not really so bad, so even starting a little bit back we still can do a good race tomorrow.”

AS IT HAPPENED: Hungarian Grand Prix qualifying

Click here for a gallery of Sergio Perez's crash in FP1 at the Hungarian Grand Prix

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.