Bottas 'confident from the first run' on Friday

40

Valtteri Bottas declared that he had felt confident from the start on Friday during practice for this weekend's Russian Grand Prix.

The Finn has always done exceptionally well at Sochi. He claimed his first win for Mercedes at the venue in 2017 and would have won again in 2018 until ordered by the team to hand over the lead to his team mate Lewis Hamilton.

Bottas took his most recent career win in last year's race, and today he picked up where he had left off by topping the timesheets in both morning and afternoon practice, just quicker than Hamilton in both cases.

Read also: Mercedes' Valtteri Bottas still best in second practice at Sochi

"I really find my flow on this track and I enjoy it," Bottas stated. "When the car works well here, it's great fun to drive.

"If you look at the timings and based on my own feeling in the car, it was a good day," he reported afterwards.

"From the first run, I had confidence in the car and the balance was very good so I could focus on my driving, looking for small gains.

"Tomorrow looks like it will be wet, so it'll be a completely different experience," he noted.

"The main thing is the car feels good on the long runs so that's encouraging for Sunday which should be dry."

Chief race engineer Andrew Shovlin was certainly satisfied by how the day had gone for both of the team's drivers.

"We had a pretty good balance to start with today and were able to put in decent times on all tyre compounds," he said. "We've often struggled on the Soft tyre this year but today it seemed to work well.

"Our long run performance was okay, but we've not got the balance quite right so there's a bit of work to do there overnight.

"The forecast looks very wet for tomorrow, especially in the morning but we're expecting dry conditions for the race.

"That's going to give us an interesting compromise to deal with, finding a setup that works well in a wet qualifying but also has good long run pace in the dry.

"Overall though, a reasonable start to the weekend."

Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter

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.