Car issues delayed Hamilton contract talks: Wolff

Bottas believes he is meeting his targets

LONDON, May 15, (RTRS): Mercedes have offered an explanation for the delay in signing a fresh contract with Lewis Hamilton by saying both parties wanted to focus on improving the Formula One team’s car.

The four times world champion and Mercedes have been talking about a lucrative new deal since last year, with regular assurances that it is on the point of being signed.

Despite talk of having something done before the start of the season in March, five races have gone by and there is still no announcement.

The Briton is otherwise out of contract at the end of the season.

“Obviously we don’t want to lose we’ll pick it up at the right time,” added the Austrian.

Hamilton started the season with pole position in Melbourne but Ferrari won the first two races.

Australian Daniel Ricciardo then put Red Bull on top of the podium in China, dealing Mercedes their third straight defeat for the first time in the V6 turbo hybrid era that started in 2014.

Mercedes have won both titles for the past four seasons.

Sunday’s race at the Circuit de Catalunya was something of a reset, with Hamilton taking his second successive win – after Azerbaijan – to stretch his championship lead to 17 points.

Mercedes also returned to the top of the constructors’ standings with their first one-two finish of the year and Hamilton finally felt at one with the car.

Asked about contract talks, Hamilton said. “We’ve had all the bosses here and there is not a single person in the team, or at least the hierarchy of the team, that has any concerns as far as I am aware”.

“We do talk about it and we are not really far away from finishing things so it will happen hopefully in the near future.”

Meanwhile, with three second places from five races, Valtteri Bottas believes he is hitting his targets for the Formula One season even if victory has so far escaped him.

The Finn, Mercedes team mate to four-times world champion Lewis Hamilton, would have been a winner in Azerbaijan last month but for suffering a puncture three laps from the end while leading.

In Spain on Sunday he followed race winner Hamilton in the team’s first one-two finish of the campaign, albeit 22 seconds adrift on very worn tyres after a massive 47 lap stint on a single set.

“I think this year I’ve been meeting more or less my targets with the performance for the beginning of the year,” Bottas, whose future beyond 2018 remains uncertain, told reporters after Sunday’s race.

“I think I’ve been able to really continue good performance since the very end of last year. There’s been no weekends that I’ve been really way off the pace, like there was a few last year. So I think I’ve learned from those.

“I just need to continue my development, there’s never things that you can’t learn more.”

Bottas won the 2017 season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, after an uneven first year at Mercedes following his move from Williams to replace retired 2016 world champion Nico Rosberg. Hamilton won nine races to Bottas’s

Hamilton

three in 2017.

He started the year with a crash in qualifying in Australia, collecting a five place grid penalty for an unscheduled gearbox change that left him 15th on the grid. He finished eighth.

The Finn bounced back by outqualifying Hamilton in Bahrain and China, finishing second in both races, and was runner-up again on Sunday in a race the champion dominated.

Had he not drawn a blank in Baku, the 28-year-old would be a lot closer to Hamilton than the current 37 points. COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado, May 15, (Agencies): Twotime US pairs champions Alexa Scimeca-Knierim and Chris Knierim have decided to change their coaches and will work with Olympic gold medalist Aliona Savchenko and her group beginning this summer.

Scimeca-Knierim and Knierim, who represented the US at the Pyeongchang Olympics, had been working with Dalilah Sappenfield in Colorado Springs for the past fiveplus years.

Now, the married couple will be working alongside a six-time world pairs champion in Savchenko, who captured her long-elusive Olympic gold medal with Bruno Massot in South Korea. The entire group will be based in Chicago and Oberstdorf, Germany.

Scimeca-Knierim said in a statement that she was appreciative of the work Sappenfield had put in for them, including on the programs that helped the US win team bronze at the Winter Games.

Swedish sport’s governing body said on Tuesday its computers had been hacked into by the Russian group Fancy Bears, who accessed and published the records of doping tests performed on its athletes.

Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton of Britain (front), leads and is followed by Ferrari driver Sebastian Vettel of Germany (right), and Mercedes driver Valtteri Bottas of Finland, during the Spanish Formula One Grand Prix at the Barcelona Catalunya racetrack in Montmelo, Spain on May 13. (AP)

A wide range of sports have been hit by doping controversies in recent years, while hacking attacks have also become more frequent - sometimes providing greater transparency into the doping problems in cycling, track and field and other events.

Russia was banned from sending a national team to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang in February due to its systematic doping abuses. All Russian track and field athletes bar one and the weightlifting team were banned from the summer games in Rio in 2016.

“The information is mostly mail conversations, but material and lists from Swedish anti-doping work has also been published,” the Swedish Sports Confederation said in a statement.

It said the attack was by the Fancy Bears hacking group, which has been linked by Western governments and security experts to a Russian spy agency blamed for some of the cyber operations that marred the 2016 US election.

Fancy Bears said on its website that the documents showed some Swedish athletes were breaking anti-doping rules. It did not immediately respond to an emailed request for more information.

The Confederation said the attack was aimed at discrediting its antidoping activities.

Fancy Bears has been blamed for an attack on the IAAF, the governing body of global athletics, in early April.

The group was also blamed for an Olympics-related hack in 2016, when the World Anti-Doping Agency said it stole and published confidential medical information on athletes.

Western governments and security experts have linked Fancy Bear, also known as APT28, to a Russian intelligence agency and have blamed it for operations including an attack on the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 US elections.

Moscow has repeatedly denied its involvement in these intrusions.