Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsWilliams

Bottas surprised by Mercedes pace

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Valtteri Bottas admits he is surprised by how quick Mercedes was able to go during the second day of the final test.

Nico Rosberg set a soft tyre lap time of 1:22.792 on Friday afternoon, 0.7s quicker than Felipe Massa had managed on the same tyre on Thursday and 1.2s clear of the rest of the field - headed by Bottas - on the second day. While Bottas was pleased with the progress made by Williams he says the Mercedes time was slightly unexpected.

“It was a good day for us,” Bottas said. “Again a completely trouble-free day which is always nice. Then we did some more performance work today after yesterday which is nice. It’s nice to get a little bit shorter runs and really try to squeeze a bit more out of the lap time. It felt OK, but I’m a little bit surprised about the speed of Mercedes.

“It looks like [they’re fastest]. It’s difficult to say exactly how much they are in front but they are in front, so I think it’s the team to beat.”

However, Bottas says Williams is confident it is in good shape ahead of the Australian Grand Prix as it looks to fine-tune the FW37 over the coming days.

“We are really looking forward to it. We know that we can be competitive but we still do have work to do. There’s two days left of testing and we’re still going to have a really busy plan. We’re confident, we’re ready to race but there’s things we can still do better and hopefully we can sort some things out in the next two days.”

Full times and day two as it happened

Click here for the gallery from day two of the final test

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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.