Williams race pace remains a disappointment for Bottas

After finishing in sixth place on the Grand Prix of Baku on Sunday, Valtteri Bottas admitted that he'd been disappointed with the pace of the Williams car on Sunday which hadn't lived up to the expectations raised in practice on Friday.

"We definitely hoped to have better pace today but we simply didn’t," he said after the race. "I’m a bit disappointed with the pace we had in the race because it wasn’t possible to finish any higher.

"The speed we expected to have wasn’t quite there but the team did a very good job with what we had: strategy, pit stop and tyre management. But we obviously need to make a better car now and get better pace.

"I’m glad we were able to make the one-stop strategy work, because it was definitively the best strategy to be on today, but unfortunately we weren’t quick enough. Still, we gained some good points and the team did a good job."

Asked to identify what exactly had held him back in the race, Bottas came back with a clear answer.

"Grip in the corners! We’ve been really quick down the straights, which today helped me to get some cars at the start, making up a couple of important positions right there. But we were just missing grip on the corners.

"I was happy with the balance, I didn’t have any graining in the tyres, I was able to push the car to the limit it has, but we still don’t have enough grip in the corners.

"This track has many, many corners, even if it has long straights, so we lost out there. We were definitively hoping for more, we thought we would be able to challenge like in Canada, so we need to have a good look at what happened to us to today."

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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.