Valtteri Bottas 'not proud' of costly spin behind safety car
Valtteri Bottas admits he’s “not proud” of the mistake he made while warming up his tires under the safety car in China.
Bottas had initially been second, but lost some places with a slow stop under the safety car. He then spun while trying to warm his tires up in the queue while preparing for the restart. He managed to recover to sixth, but that was far less than his pace indicated that he deserved.
“First of all what happened was a bit of a slow pit stop,” he said. “I think after the reasonable start to the race we could have kept the position, but we had a problem with the rear jack, so the car dropped to ground, and one guy by pure force lifted the rear of the car. We lost a couple of places there.
“The main thing for me from the race which made us lose a lot of points was the spin I had during the safety car, which was a mistake I’m not really proud of. I was trying to everything I could to make the tires warm, I was trying to have the tires warmer than any car around, to be able to attack.
“I was going quite slow, trying to put heat in the tires by going left to right, and accelerating at the same time. I had a bit of a slide, over-corrected, and spun to the grass. It was slow to get out of the grass.
“I went too far and just lost the car and made a mistake and spun, lost a lot of time, a lot of places, a lot of tire temperature. It was a bit of a slow start after that to get the tires to work.
“In the clean air the car was fast today Lewis proved it, it was a winning car. So very, very disappointed with sixth and my mistake.”
Bottas, who quickly apologized to the team, was frustrated at losing a much better result.
“I definitely apologized to everyone. A silly mistake. I guess this happens, but it's feels pretty [expletive] when it happens to you. But the main thing is not to do it again. And I'm glad Bahrain is in one week. The worst thing to do now is not to stop thinking about that mistake. I need to understand how I can prevent it in the future, and just need to move on.
“I know the pace is there, I can do very good things with the car. And I think as a team we did a stronger job in terms of car pace than what we had on Sunday in Melbourne. Just need to keep going and the results will come.”
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