Bottas "creaks under the pressure" or was he just unlucky?
- GPblog.com
Valtteri Bottas has not been able to redeem his pole position for the second time in three races. However, this time he also had to deal with damage to his floor causing him to lose downward pressure. Giedo van der Garde thinks that that cost him the victory.
"Bottas already had that problem on lap two," says the former F1 driver in his analysis for Ziggo Sport. "If your floor is broken, that's where so much downforce comes from. You also saw that thing just wasn't controllable. I think if he didn't have problems, he would have won. Anyway, that's not true and Hamilton just really did a world race."
Robert Doornbos on the other side of the table has trouble getting Van der Garde to speak out. He has a completely different view on this race. Broken floor or not, Bottas didn't show enough in his eyes.
Bottas made multiple mistakes
"I see another Bottas like on the Nürburgring. It just creaks under pressure. I also noticed that he was looking in his mirrors very often. If you do that at 280 kilometers per hour at the end of the straight, you actually miss your reference point in that one second."
Verstappen was finally able to pass Bottas because he made a braking error when entering the Rivazza. As a result, Verstappen was on the straight close enough behind the Mercedes to go on the attack. It was a mistake that Bottas had made before, but then it ended well.