The Finn was only able to qualify in sixth place on the grid for Sunday’s season finale in Abu Dhabi after battling for speed in Q3 when he landed behind McLaren’s Lando Norris, Sergio Perez’s Red Bull and Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari.
Bottas was six tenths slower than Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton, who was beaten to pole position by title rival Max Verstappen.
But Bottas stated that his pace struggles were due to the fact that he was prioritizing his car setup for the race and he was forced to run an engine with an older mileage.
“I somehow reached a lap time limit,” said Bottas. “I think I actually set my best time in Q2 and I was never able to improve.
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“It felt like the more I tried, the more I tried to set my car out of it. I tuned my car to be pretty soft mechanically because I feel like it’s pretty good for the race.
“I was hoping that it would still be okay for qualifying, but the grip level has improved a lot.
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“The other factor was that we had to switch to an older power unit for today that I knew would cost me at least two-tenths of what it was yesterday, at least compared to yesterday’s power unit.”
When asked why Mercedes decided to change the engine, Bottas replied: “We are more convinced of this power unit in terms of reliability.”
Bottas said he lost performance as grip improved over the course of qualifying.
“When the grip level started to improve during qualifying, I basically couldn’t improve the lap time,” he said. “The car was like a hard limit and the more it started to roll, that was the limit.
Bottas added that Mercedes also lost time to Red Bull in the slowest corners.
“I would say Turn 5 and then Turn 6 and 7 were a bit of a problem, but I’d say the medium speed turns were fine for us,” he explained.
“Those two spots were a bit difficult, I can’t say exactly why, but Red Bull always seems to be good on corners like this anyway.”
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