Bottas points finger at ‘confused’ systems after Baku shunt

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Cadillac’s Valtteri Bottas was left wondering in Baku whether a bizarre systems glitch was behind his late Azerbaijan Grand Prix crash after an otherwise unremarkable afternoon suddenly took a strange turn.

The Finn had little to celebrate during last Saturday’s race, spending much of the afternoon towards the back of the field as Cadillac struggled to offer him anything more than a fight with Aston Martin.

But with the finish line finally within sight, Bottas’ race took an unexpected twist.

Running dead last, the 36-year-old was on course to bring his MAC-26 home among the remaining runners when he crashed at Turn 15, just a few hundred metres before beginning the penultimate lap.

What happened next left Bottas sufficiently puzzled to suggest that Cadillac should dig into the car’s data and establish whether its onboard systems had somehow become confused.

A strange chain of events

Bottas believes the trouble may have started earlier in the lap when he locked up at Turn 1 and ran wide, forcing him to spend additional time and distance away from the normal racing line.

“First of all, on the same lap, I had a lock-up into Turn 1, I went wide,” he explained. “Then I think the systems got a bit confused, because of the extra distance.

“I had a huge super-clip into [Turn] 15 and then, when I hit the brakes, only the front brakes worked.”

The description immediately raises questions about what exactly was happening inside the increasingly complex machinery of F1’s current-generation cars.

Bottas felt something was fundamentally wrong when he arrived at the braking zone, with the rear of his car apparently no longer behaving as expected.

“It was almost like I wasn’t harvesting anymore with the rears [tyres], so something [became] a bit confused there,” he added.

“We need to have a look at what happened, but it was an odd one, because it felt like I lost the rear brakes. It felt like I lost the rear harvesting.”

Cadillac seeking answers

The Finn was sufficiently intrigued by the incident that he stayed at the scene after climbing from the stricken Cadillac to examine the car.

That decision brought its own complication, however, with the stewards investigating Bottas for remaining in an unsafe location.

For Cadillac, though, the more important investigation is likely to take place away from the track, as its engineers seek to determine whether Bottas’ unusual sequence of events exposed a systems problem.

The incident also provides another intriguing glimpse into the technological complexity of F1’s latest regulations.

With this generation of cars relying more heavily on sophisticated electrical and energy-management systems, even a relatively innocent off-track excursion can potentially have consequences that are not immediately obvious to the driver.

Bottas’ crash may have looked straightforward from the outside, but from inside the cockpit, something altogether stranger appeared to be unfolding.

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Michael Delaney