With two riders to compete for the World Championship on equal points, in these days in Abu Dhabi there has been a lot of talk about the importance that teammates will be able to have in tomorrow’s race.
At least as regards Saturday, Valtteri Bottas came out with broken bones in comparison with Sergio Perez. The Mexican from Red Bull managed at the same time to give Max Verstappen a precious trail and to finish qualifying in fourth place.
The Finn, who reached his last race with Mercedes after a five-season adventure, instead experienced a very disappointing qualifying, failing to do better than sixth place. A result that he justified with a power unit quite advanced in mileage and with a work aimed above all at the race.
“For sure I was hoping for a better result. I knew it would be complicated, because yesterday we had replaced the engine with an older one, so there is a deficit of a few tenths. In terms of set-up I concentrated a lot on the race, so it wasn’t perfect. for qualifying. We’ll see if it works tomorrow, “Bottas told Sky Sport F1 HD.
Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes
Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images
The other consolation for Bottas is that tomorrow the only ones to start with medium tires in the top positions will be him and his teammate Lewis Hamilton, in addition to Yuki Tsunoda’s AlphaTauri. Valtteri believes this can be an important advantage in terms of strategy.
“I think it opens up more opportunities and also to different strategies. We can go longer in the first stint if we want, while with the soft you can’t because they degrade very quickly. This could be an advantage depending on how the race goes. However it will be interesting. because we have different tires than the Red Bulls. “
Then when asked why Mercedes did not plan any contrail games, he added: “We have never planned this type of strategy, because normally it is easy to go wrong, compromising the result of the other driver. them today worked well. “
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