Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsWilliams

Bottas relishing return to the scene of former success

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For Williams F1 driver Valtteri Bottas, returning to the Circuit of the Americas this week is a reminder of a very happy time in the Finn's career.

"Austin is the place where I scored my first points so it will always be special to me," he explained.

"It’s also one of my favourite circuits to drive, with fast sweeping corners," he added. "Austin as a city is a fantastic place, accompanied by great weather. For me it’s one of the best locations on the calendar."

His team mate Felipe Massa was in agreement about the appeal of Austin, both as a city and a great place to race.

"Austin is a beautiful place with a great circuit which has fantastic infrastructure," he said. "The fans really enjoy Formula One and the drivers like to go there.

"The circuit is very fun to drive with many fast corners. The first sector is incredible leading into a long straight with the opportunity for overtaking.

"The first corner is special - the elevation change is incredible and the space available means it’s a great place to pass and it’s hard to defend."

As for the team's head of performance engineering Rob Smedley, Austin is a place to lay to rest some of the aggravating niggles that prevented Williams from making the most of the last outing in the Russian Grand Prix at Sochi.

"We head to Austin after not getting all of the points we should have done in Russia despite having a really good car with great pace," he admitted.

"We need to keep pulling open a gap on Red Bull and the team must keep on fighting to get as many points as possible.

"We are in a positive frame of mind and the circuit suits our car so we should have a good race," he added. "Both drivers are coming off the back of really good drives in the last Grand Prix so we should be able to score some decent points."

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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.