Valtteri Bottas had qualified seventh for the Russian Grand Prix, but on Sunday morning it turned out that Mercedes switched him to his fifth internal combustion engine, turbocharger and MGU-H, forcing him to start the race in sixteenth place. The question was whether the Finn was actually ready for these new engine parts, after he had already installed a new power unit in Monza, or whether it was mainly a tactical move by Mercedes to Max Verstappen bother even more. After all, the Dutchman was last on the grid, having switched to his fourth power source of the season earlier in the weekend.
“No, it was pure necessity,” said Bottas after the race when asked by Motorsport.com whether the engine change had been made in view of Verstappen’s starting position. “If we hadn’t done it, there would have been a good chance we wouldn’t have made it to the finish. So we faced quite a few problems. The Monza engine is ready.”
The fact that Bottas ended up on the grid a few places ahead of Verstappen was nevertheless a nice side effect for Mercedes. Only the driver from Nastola did not manage to keep the Red Bull away for long. In the seventh round, the job was done. Bottas then also failed to follow Verstappen’s lead. “He just managed to move up the field very easily. I do not know. I’ll check back to see if I could have done more. But I think he passed me fairly easily. Then he overtook the men for me, so I didn’t have a chance to do anything else [richting Verstappen] to do.”
“Getting up through the field was a lot harder for me than I had imagined. I thought it would be much more like Monza. But it turned out to be a lot harder. Max managed to move forward much better than I did. I don’t know what was the reason for that. I did struggle with a lot of understeer when I got close behind someone. That kept me from getting close to enough people to overtake them.”
‘Position was possible’
Bottas looked set to finish in fourteenth place outside the points, but an early intermediate pit stop meant he eventually crossed the finish line in fifth. “I actually wanted to go in one lap earlier, but the team wasn’t ready yet,” said Bottas. “But I was still one of the first to make a pit stop and that saved us. In any case, I was able to score good points, and in the end we scored many more points than Red Bull.”
What if he had stopped a lap earlier, as he actually wanted? “Then I would have been on the podium,” he thinks. “I said I wanted to stop and asked if that was possible after I had just come out of Turn 15. However, they yelled at me to stay on the track. Anyway, the result could have been much worse.”
F1 update: The Russian Grand Prix discussed extensively
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