Bottas a 'very deserved winner' says Mercedes team boss
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has praised Valtteri Bottas for the way he has taken up the challenge of being Lewis Hamilton’s teammate, and has subsequently shown that he is worthy of the job by scoring his first win in Russia.
Wolff was keen to dismiss the inevitable speculation about the Finn’s long term future that followed a difficult first few races with the team. At the moment he only has one-year deal with Mercedes.
“It is crazy that someone speculates about his position after three races,” said Wolff. “You need to give the guy time. He was an outstanding driver in the junior categories, and has been at Williams for a long time, and there wasn’t a single year where he wasn’t performing compared to his teammate.
“Now he took up that risk, and he moved to be Lewis Hamilton’s teammate, to take over the reigning world champion’s car and I think that he has done a very good job. He has been on pole once, and won the race today, with a lot of pressure from Sebastian behind. Fantastic start, fantastic pace on the ultra soft at the beginning of the race, and I think he is a very deserved winner.”
Wolff said that Bottas won the race with his pace in the first stint, when he opened a gap on pursuer Sebastian Vettel.
“You could see that Valtteri was really pushing at the beginning, and then made this gap of five seconds, and this is why his tire was a little bit more worn than Sebastian’s, because he was able to pull faster lap times and faster sectors, and that is why they kept him out – hoping it would be enough. And they actually closed the gap quite a lot, because the supersoft was performing as well on our car as the ultra, and we still ended up with backmarkers again. So that’s why it got a bit marginal again.”
He admitted that the pit wall was concerned after Bottas locked his front tires with some 14 laps to run.
“He locked both front tires and flat-spotted them, and our vibration metrics showed that it was pretty severe damage to the tires, which harmed his performance at the end. And it was a bit of a stressful moment. But he kept it together. You could see the pace was still good enough, sector one was obviously very good, but even in sector two he was able to fight back.
“There was the odd tenth he lost, but the next lap around he was good again. So it wasn’t all plain sailing for Ferrari either, and obviously again backmarker traffic was an issue, sometimes it went against us, sometime like with Felipe [Massa] – thank you very much, I have to get him a beer – it was in favor of us, but this is how it goes.”
