After losing to Red Bull for pole at the Bahrain Grand Prix three weeks ago, Mercedes struck back at Imola when Lewis Hamilton won qualifying on Saturday.
Team-mate Bottas, however, had a more difficult end to qualifying when he dropped to eighth place in the final standings and landed almost half a second before Hamilton’s lap time.
It was a big setback for Bottas, who led both trainings on Friday and led the first quarter with a lap time that would have put him in fourth on the grid if it had been discontinued in the third quarter.
Bottas said after the meeting that he was struggling with the instability of the rear end when it came down to it in the third quarter due to lack of confidence in corner entry and wanted Mercedes to check his car to investigate what was causing the problem caused.
“I couldn’t trust the rear of the car, and I didn’t feel that before during the entire qualifying,” said Bottas.
“So I don’t know what happened. I have to investigate. For sure, [it’s] disappointing.”
Toto Wolff, Team Principal and CEO of Mercedes AMG, and James Allison, Technical Director of Mercedes AMG
Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff explained after qualifying that both Bottas and Hamilton had to deal with a problem with warming up the tires at the beginning of their Q3 lap, which caused the deficit.
“Valtteri was pretty good on turns 2 and 3 all weekend, but both drivers had a warm-up problem at the beginning of the lap,” said Wolff.
“When we were able to do a second lap on the tire of Valtteri in the first quarter to increase the temperatures, it was really very good. I think the Q1 lap, the second Q1 lap, would have brought him to P4.
“So it’s a warm-up problem and we know exactly what it is and Valtteri knows it.
“Still, he’s in a good position for tomorrow’s race.”
Bottas lost four tenths of a second to Hamilton’s pole position in the first sector alone, with the last gap being 0.487 seconds.
At the end of the third quarter, Hamilton lost a tenth of a second compared to his best time in the first sector and finished his fastest lap time 0.022 seconds back, but was still able to secure pole position.
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