Bottas had already expressed his concerns about pit stops
Valterri Bottas does not hide his disappointment about his retirement in the last Monaco Grand Prix, and plans to bounce back this weekend. The Finnish driver's concerns were not new!
It was the big absentee from the pilots’ press conference. Bottas had not decided to boycott this exercise, but he could not take part for a completely different reason. The Mercedes driver could not arrive in Azerbaijan on time due to a plane problem and had to participate in the conference via the Zoom platform. Despite this setback, Bottas should arrive in Baku in good shape.
On the occasion of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the Finn plans to move forward and leave behind the issues of Monaco. However, Bottas does not hide that he had trouble digesting this episode.
« Personally, it took me two days, I must say, because it’s not the best start of the season and this kind of problem hurts. But I’m not worried, I’ll get through it and I can’t wait to race again. […] There was a detailed analysis, of course, to understand what happened, why it happened, how we can prevent it from happening again in the future. It’s really about learning from the problem and correcting it. I believe the team now fully understands this, and we have made corrections so that, hopefully, we won’t have to go through that again. »
This problem arises after the Finn confessed his concern to his team about pit stops. The #77 would have mentioned it a few weeks ago.
« We analyze everything in a truly open manner, and definitely not by pointing fingers at anyone. We analyze things honestly by admitting the weaknesses, in this case, the pit stop, which was already a source of concern for me a few weeks ago, and I had informed the team about it. So it didn’t come out of nowhere, we knew that our pit stops were not perfect, as well as other areas like warming up the tires during qualifying. I knew, when arriving in Monaco, that it would be an issue, and it’s one of the things I emphasized the most approaching the weekend. We have analyzed everything in detail and we know that we probably could have done better as a team, he explained.
Bottas’s position, explanation of the bad pit stop?
In the German press, the executive director of Mercedes, Toto Wolff, suggested that Bottas’ position may have contributed to the issue during the tire change. This hypothesis surprised the Finnish driver who believes he stopped his car correctly.
« It was a completely normal debrief on my side. Of course, I want to see all the reports concerning the place where I stopped, and I believe it was two or three centimeters from the central axis. Usually, if we have this precision, it’s rather good. You know, one can easily vary from ten to fifteen centimeters, so I thought I was quite precise. But it was a normal debrief, honestly, and obviously we discussed the following week with my engineers, analyzing everything, and at the factory everyone was fully committed to understanding everything. There is nothing unusual for us, it was just a bigger setback than some other weekends in terms of the result, but otherwise the procedure was normal. » explains Bottas.
