Valtteri Bottas Tag

By FIA After finishing fastest in the first practice session for the Spanish Grand Prix, Valtteri Bottas again set the pace in the afternoon, outpacing team-mate Lewis Hamilton by 0.049s as Mercedes pulled away from Ferrari. Charles Leclerc was third for the Scuderia, three tenths of a second behind Bottas. Bottas went a tenth quicker than Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel in the opening practice session but in the afternoon both Bottas and Hamilton opened a healthy gap to the Italian squad during the performance runs. Vettel and Leclerc were the firstRead More

By FIA Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas set the pace in the opening practice session for the Spanish Grand Prix, beating Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel and Charles by a narrow margin before an oil leak ended the Finn’s session early. After an early spell on medium tyres World Championship leader Bottas set his best lap of the 90 minutes on the C3 Pirelli compound nominated as this weekend’s soft tyre. He opened his account on the softs with a lap of 1:17.990s, but then shaved a little under four hundredths of a secondRead More

By FIA There was payback in Baku for Valtteri Bottas as the Finn won the Azerbaijan Grand Prix one year on from being denied almost certain victory in the city due to a late-race puncture. There was no repeat of that kind of drama in today’s fourth F1 race at the notoriously tricky street circuit and after resisting pressure off the starting line from team-mate Lewis Hamilton, Bottas delivered a faultless performance in a largely incident-free race to take the fifth F1 win of his career. Second place for Hamilton ahead of Ferrari’sRead More

By FIA Valtteri Bottas took his second pole position of the 2019 FIA Formula One World Championship at the end of a marathon, incident-packed qualifying session that saw two red flag periods for separate crashes involving Robert Kubica and pole position contender Charles Leclerc. Bottas made the best of a tight final run in Q3, maximising a good two to edge team-mate Lewis Hamilton by just 0.059s, with Sebastian Vettel third ahead of Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen. In Q1, Vettel led the early exchanges, setting a time of 1:42.348.Read More

By FIA Charles Leclerc went quickest in final practice for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, as both he and second-placed Ferrari team-mate Sebastian Vettel eclipsed their rivals by more than a second. In the qualifying simulations at the end of the third practice session at the Baku City Circuit, Leclerc set a time of 141.604 to take top spot. Vettel, who had languished some way off his young team-mate’s pace during the session, then delivered his own telling lap to take P2 just 0.198s behind the young Monegasque driver. The emphaticRead More

By FIA Lewis Hamilton won Formula 1’s 1000thworld championship race, getting the jump of polesitting team-mate Valtteri Bottas off the line at the start to take a lead he then held for the full race distance. Sebastian Vettel was third ahead of Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. Hamilton made a good start from second place on the grid to power past Bottas, who afterward admitted he had been disadvantaged by momentary wheelspin on the start/finish line. Starting from the same side of the grid as Hamilton, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc also gotRead More

By FIA Finland’s Valtteri Bottas will line up for Formula 1’s 1000thgrand prix in pole position after he beat Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton by the narrow margin of 0.023s. The pole is the seventh of Bottas’ career and the 59thfront-row lockout for Mercedes. Behind the Silver Arrows, Ferrari annexed row two with Sebastian Vettel in third place, 0.017s ahead of team-mate Charles Leclerc. Bottas was to the fore early in Q1, and the Finn claimed top spot thanks to a lap of 1:32.658. That left him almost half a secondRead More

By FIA Mercedes Valtteri Bottas went quickest in final practice to the Chinese Grand Prix in a session curtailed due a heavy crash involving Toro Rosso’s Alex Albon.  With six minutes remaining in the session the Thai driver went wide in the final corner. He attempted to correct the error and that sent his Toro into a spin. He hit the barriers hard, destroying the whole left-hand side of his car. The Toro Rosso driver was quickly on the radio to confirm he was unhurt and to apologise for aRead More

By FIA FIA Formula One World Championship title leader Valtteri Bottas took top spot in second practice for this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix, narrowly beating Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel. Vettel topped the morning session in Shanghai using medium compound Pirelli tyres, with Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton second and Bottas fifth on soft rubber, but in the FP2 performance runs the Silver Arrows improved, with Bottas eventually edging Vettel by a little under three hundredths of a second and with Hamilton fourth behind Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. After the teams’ early runs, whichRead More

By FIA Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was denied a first Formula One victory by a late-race engine problem that allowed Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton to sweep past and claim his first win of 2019. Leclerc had led for the bulk of the race, but in the closing stages began to slow and reported an engine problem that was quickly diagnosed as an issue with the turbo. His pace flagged dramatically and at the end of the 48thlap of the 57 scheduled, Hamilton powered past to claim the lead. He was followed byRead More