Bottas says cooling improvements worked
F1 News
- Bevan Youl
After working through the extreme temperatures during Friday practice at the German Grand Prix Valtteri Bottas feels the parts introduced to help Mercedes cooling issues have made a big difference.
With air temperatures in the 30’s the track temperature of the Hockenheimring was above 50C, making it very difficult for teams to find optimum performance.
Bottas said after FP2: “It was extremely hot.
“I can’t remember having this hot conditions last time.
“It makes it more tricky for sure, especially for the cars and tyres, lots of overheating. Especially sector three with the corner combinations.
“It becomes so sensitive, you slide a bit more, you pick up 10 degrees of extra tyre temperature and you can lose a few tenths like this.”
A couple of races ago in Austria Mercedes struggled with cooling issues in the high altitude and temperatures, something Bottas feels the team has made improvements on with their new parts.
“I think we’ve made progress,” he added.
“With the package we had in Austria we would have struggled massively today. But now we could actually complete some good long runs.”
“It’s going to get a lot better for Saturday [on] Sunday with the temperature.
“So it’s good to see we’ve been able to improve that.
“We tried to do some long runs in practice one as well, it was a bit cooler than in the afternoon.
“So for sure we learned quite a bit from the tyres for the set-up.
“But it’s going to be completely different tomorrow. There could be rain on the way, same on Sunday.
“So it’s going to be a day that we need to be very reactive, very dynamic with the weather and with the car set-up.”