London: With three second places from five races, Valtteri Bottas stated he is hitting his targets for the Formula One (F1) season even if victory has so far escaped him.
The Finn, Mercedes teammate to four-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton, would have been a winner in Azerbaijan last month but for suffering a puncture three laps from the end while leading.
Sunday in Barcelona he followed race winner Hamilton in the team’s first one-two finish of the campaign, albeit 22 seconds adrift on very worn tyres after a massive 47 lap stint on a single set.
“I think this year I’ve been meeting more or less my targets with the performance for the beginning of the year,” Bottas, whose future beyond 2018 remains uncertain, told reporters Wednesday.
“I think I’ve been able to really continue good performance since the very end of last year. There have been no weekends that I’ve been really way off the pace, like there was a few last year. So I think I’ve learned from those. I just need to continue my development, there are never things that you can’t learn more,” he added.
Bottas won the 2017 season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, after an uneven first year at Mercedes following his move from Williams to replace retired 2016 World Champion Nico Rosberg. Hamilton won nine races to Bottas’s three in 2017.
Bottas has had some criticism too, with Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo – among those most likely to replace him – stating after Bahrain that he would have tried to pass Ferrari’s race winner Sebastian Vettel rather than settling for second.
“I think there’s been quite mixed races and the end results haven’t been really I feel sometimes quite there, that I feel would have been possible with the pace we have,” declared Bottas. “The gap to Lewis was huge (in Barcelona), but there were many things that affected that.”
“I am pretty please at the way things have turned out so far. It could have obviously been better,
but I have no complaints”
Valtteri Bottas