Bottas unhappy with 'not normal' Mercedes strategy

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Valtteri Bottas made no secret of his dissatisfaction with the Mercedes approach to today's Bahrain Grand Prix, and a costly mistake in pit lane that left him out of the climactic battle for victory between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen.

Bottas finished in third place behind the pair, but felt that the team should have been more ambitious with its strategy. "It was good, but I am disappointed.

“It’s disappointing for sure," he explained. "The team got good points, which is a good thing, but from my side the strategy was too much on the defensive side instead of attacking.

Read more: Hamilton hangs on to beat Verstappen in thrilling season opener

"I’m quite surprised and it is not quite normal," Bottas admitted in the post-race interviews held in parc ferme. "I feel we were more passive than aggressive with the strategy in the end."

After losing out o pole position to Verstappen on Saturday, Mercedes had opted to pit Hamilton early in the race to prevent Verstappen from building up too big an advantage that would allow the Dutch driver enough of a gap to pit and retain the lead.

Bottas pitted three laps later, still a lap earlier than Verstappen, and took on the same hard compound tyres as his team mate.

That meant he was forced to make his second stop on lap 30 where a sticky right front wheel cost him almost ten seconds stationary in the pit box.

"I wanted to stay out longer in the middle stint on fresher tyres, but it wouldn’t have made much difference in the end," he accepted.

“I also had a slow pit-stop, which took away any opportunities, and in the end P3 was the maximum. But the pace was quite good at times.

"We will review everything," he added. “We managed to have two cars with different tyre choices so we could play with the strategy, but from my side I think there should have been more to get today.

One silver lining to the Finn's day was that by the end of the race he had enough clear space around him on track to make a 'free' extra stop that allowed him to take on a final used set of mediums and claim the extra point for setting the fastest lap of the race.

As a result of the two drivers combined efforts, Mercedes secured 41 points from the opening race of the season, with Red Bull reaping just 28 points from Verstappen and his new team mate Sergio Perez who crossed the line in fifth.

“If you had told us after winter testing we would have got more points than Red Bull today we would have taken it,” he acknowledged. “There are positives to take and we move on [but] it’s still very early days in the championship.”

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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.