Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsWilliams

Bottas calls on Williams to exploit potential

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Valtteri Bottas says Williams has more potential than it was able to show in Malaysia last weekend.

Having ended 2014 as the closest challenger to Mercedes, Williams was hopeful of maintaining that position this season. However, after Felipe Massa was beaten to third place by Sebastian Vettel in Melbourne, the two Williams cars were a distant fifth and sixth in Malaysia as Vettel took victory for Ferrari.

With the gap to the race winner well over a minute at Sepang, Bottas admits Williams expected to be more competitive compared to the ultimate pace at this stage of the season.

“In an ideal race, starting at the front, it wouldn’t be that big, but it is still much bigger than we expected,” Bottas said. “It shows that we have a lot of work to do and there is much more potential, we need to get more power from us. We will have some updates coming and all we can do now is learn from anything we can, to just keep pushing to the maximum.”

And Bottas says it is clear Williams’ biggest weakness is slow speed corners, which made it more difficult to overtake in Malaysia.

“In traffic, we seem to struggle a bit in the slow speed corners, getting out of them, compared to the Toro Rossos and Red Bulls we are missing a bit, but in the high speed corners we seem to be OK. Straight-line speed is good, but we are missing in those places.”

Click here for a more lighthearted look at some of the scenes from the Malaysian Grand Prix

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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.