Bottas: a pole after a first lap "good", but "not perfect"!
The Finn clearly still had more to give, despite securing first place in Q3!
Valtteri Bottas, back at the top of the grid! Dominated since the Spanish Grand Prix two months ago, the driver with the number 77 has set the record straight by beating Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc by a hair. Behind Hamilton in Q1, Bottas accelerated in Q2, on medium tires, which will be used at the start this Sunday. While the Finn was more than a tenth ahead of his garage neighbor in Q2, the match intensified considerably in Q3. Surprisingly, Bottas made his performance on his first flying lap: “I knew my first lap was good. But it wasn’t perfect,” noted the former Williams driver to David Coulthard’s microphone once he got out of the car.
But the second part of his session visibly leaves him with some regrets: “Honestly, I should have improved on the second run,” notes an uncompromising poleman. “I’m satisfied that it’s enough, it wasn’t easy to put together a good lap overall,” adds Bottas, who is apparently pointing to the new, very slippery surface.
In any case, Bottas clinches the tenth pole of his career, the fourth in 2019 after those obtained in Shanghai, Baku, and Barcelona. Ending on an optimistic note: it feels good, it reminds us why we do all this! It’s been very close since the beginning of the weekend with Lewis, so it’s a good thing to get the pole.
On his side, Lewis Hamilton experienced a different progression from his teammate, with a more difficult first lap. Aggressive, the Briton lost a few tenths, sliding in the fifth turn, after the first DRS zone. He recovered on his second attempt, improving despite a rather slow first tenth. « It simply wasn’t enough. I just wasn’t good enough. An error in the first and also in the second lap got us in there » noted Hamilton laconically, who remains stuck at five pole positions at Silverstone, equal to Alain Prost, the other record holder in this exercise on the English track.
Another Finn-tastic qualifying performance from @ValtteriBottas 🇫🇮#BritishGP 🇬🇧 #F1 pic.twitter.com/j8WgYkSmww
— Formula 1 (@F1) 13 juillet 2019
