Valtteri Bottas makes his mark with first career pole
Valtteri Bottas logged the first pole of his F1 career in Bahrain, and also the first for a Finn since Heikki Kovalainen started at the front at the 2008 British GP.
Bottas didn’t put a foot wrong on a day when Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton didn’t quite get it right, although the Briton was gracious in defeat.
“It’s the first pole in my career,” said Bottas. “It’s my fifth season now in Formula One. It took a few races, but I got it and hopefully it’s the first of many. But just want to say big thanks to the team for giving me this car, to drive it on pole.
“We’re both starting on the front row. I think we made a really good job this weekend, to really focus on the evening conditions and we really managed to get a lot of lap time out of the car in the slightly cooler conditions and hopefully that’s going to help is tomorrow as well.
“It’s not an easy track to get everything right. It is quite technical; there are quite a few difficult braking points, turning ins to the corner, it’s easy to have a lock-up or just miss the apex slightly. So it is just getting the lap together and to get the car well balanced. It was a good enough lap for the pole today, so that’s good.”
Bottas says he’s much more at one with the car after three races.
“I definitely feel now much more comfortable in the car, with the car than, for example, qualifying in Melbourne. So yeah, the more laps, the more time you spend with a car and driving it, you get to be more at one with the car. So, definitely feel better and better, like I said earlier. Yeah. Felt better here than, for example, last week in China in qualifying. It’s good. I need to keep doing that progress and keep trying to get better all of the time.”
Meanwhile, he has already turned his thoughts to Sunday’s race.
“The main thing is tomorrow, so there is no point to start dreaming about anything. We need to look at everything, whatever we can do tomorrow, work together as a team and plan a good strategy, a plan for the race tomorrow.
“For me it’s all about just focusing for the race and getting the maximum out of it but definitely a good place to start and I think as a team we can be really strong tomorrow and we can get that one-two, the first one for the year.”
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