Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsWilliams

Bottas had to ‘disturb’ Vettel

Valtteri Bottas says he had to try to “disturb” Sebastian Vettel to keep the Ferrari behind him in the Bahrain Grand Prix.

Vettel dropped behind the Williams after damaging his front wing, needing to pit soon after his second pit stop for a new nose. Emerging in fifth place behind Bottas, Vettel was unable to find a way past in the closing laps as the Finn held on to fourth place despite being in the slower car. After successfully defending for so long, Bottas says he enjoyed the challenge of having to hold off the Ferrari.

"It was not easy because he was approaching really quickly," Bottas said. "I knew it was going to be really tricky, they had a lot of pace. I just tried to do all the things possible to keep him behind – getting good exits, making sure at all the corners the lines are completely correct to try and disturb him, try and get better exits than him, and any boost we had available from the engine it was important to use at the right places."

And Bottas says the result gives him encouragement that Williams is heading in the right direction as it looks to close the gap to the leading two teams.

"I think pretty maximum result so from my side of the garage we can be happy with what we achieved today. We were closer to Ferrari and Mercedes in race pace compared to China, which is good. Obviously there’s plenty of work to do but we’re on the right way."

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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.