Bottas back after ‘greatest race’
Ferrari’s bubble bursts in Australian disappointment
VALTTERI BOTTAS savoured the “greatest” race of his career yesterday as he claimed a dominant win for Mercedes in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix and left a doubt-stricken 2018 firmly in his rear-view mirror.
The 29-year-old Finn could not buy a win last season and finished fifth in the drivers’ championship as teammate Lewis Hamilton collected 11 on the way to his fifth title.
With young Frenchman Esteban Ocon waiting in the wings as Mercedes’ reserve driver, Bottas went into the off-season hounded by doubts and with speculation over the security of his race seat.
He passed the break getting drunk with friends at home, growing a beard, taking a turn in a rally car and nurturing a new photography hobby.
The man that returned to Melbourne felt at peace enough to declare he was ready to beat anybody.
After qualifying second, he made good on his word at Albert Park yesterday as he got the jump on pole-sitter Hamilton at the start and roared to a dominant, 20-second-plus victory.
Bottas hailed the “greatest race” of his career, icing the cake of his fourth F1 win by claiming a bonus point for registering the fastest lap.
While busy over the break, the Finn said he had found time to review everything about his preparations and brought a different mindset to Melbourne.
“Every year you learn as a person, you learn about yourself what works for you, what doesn’t in terms of preparation, which includes how you rest, how you spend your free time, how you do your training ... All sorts,” he said.
“So we were just trying to optimise everything again ... I don’t know, it’s quite difficult to explain what’s been going on in here over the last winter inside my head.
“Definitely something changed in terms of the way I feel about things ... That’s all in my thoughts, but I felt good today in the car and yesterday and that’s all that matters.”
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff was among the many to remind Bottas that only performance guarantees race seats in F1. But the Austrian was left doffing his cap yesterday.
“Especially the second half of the season, he was completely written off,” said Wolff.
“People didn’t think that he was up for the job and he bounces back in the most dominant way, completely in control of the whole weekend. When he came back from the winter, he said ‘I’m back’. I think he rediscovered the joy of driving with his rally outing and mentally he remains strong.”
Meanwhile, early warning signs that all was not well at Ferrari came to a head yesterday as the would-be Formula One contenders flopped in the season-opener.
While Bottas claimed a dominant win for Mercedes and his teammate Lewis Hamilton held off Red Bull’s Max Verstappen for second, Ferrari’s drivers were left scrambling for minor points in a sobering start for the Scuderia.
Ferrari had been the quickest car at winter testing, just edging champions Mercedes, but Barcelona must have felt a distant memory as Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc crossed fourth and fifth, nearly a minute behind Bottas.
Vettel sounded alarm bells after Friday practice when he said he felt strangely uncomfortable with the car.
But the German would have hoped for better after qualifying third on Saturday. Instead, it took an order from the team garage just to preserve his fourth placing, with new boy Leclerc warned off from overtaking the four-time champion in the final laps.
Called in to pit early to change soft tyres for mediums, Vettel lost pace late on and said the strategy was wrong.
“By the looks of it, of course we did (pit too early) because I was struggling with the tyres, so we need to have a good look,” he said.
But strategy could not explain why the car was sluggish at corners and had handled so poorly.
“But I think even ignoring the lap that we pitted, it looked like other people had way less problems so I’m not quite sure what was the issue,” he said. | Reuters