Bottas: Mercedes ‘need to deal’ with tyre overheating issues

Valtteri Bottas is wary of Mercedes suffering with overheating its tyres due to the high track temperatures at Silverstone but is content with his progress after Friday practice.

The Finnish driver is looking to bounce back from a mechanical DNF triggered by a hydraulics issue last week at the Austrian Grand Prix, with Mercedes forced into making a provisional engine change to monitor the issue.

With Bottas already using his last permitted engine of the year, while Mercedes is confident the previous one will still be useable, the Finn is keeping an eye on Ferrari’s pace after Sebastian Vettel topped Friday practice for the first time in 2018.

Bottas ended FP2 third quickest, with less than half a second splitting all Mercedes and Ferrari drivers, and he’s eager for the German manufacturer to get on top of its tyre management in hot conditions at Silverstone. Hamilton suffered badly with tyre blisters in hot temperatures in Austria last weekend and it is feared to be a weaknesses with W09 has compared to its front-running rivals.

“For us, we got the soft tyre to work okay and it feels quite nice on this track. We had some overheating issues because the track temperatures were over 50º Celsius today,” Bottas said. “It’s going to be the same thing on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, so we just need to deal with that.

“Like we’ve seen before, the harder tyre is a bit more robust, it’s also a bit slower, but will go longer.

“So far it has been okay, but we’ve seen some high temperatures and with the race being much longer than the long runs we do on Friday, it could be an issue or not. We’ll see on Sunday.

“Ferrari looked really competitive, for us we for sure can find more performance but, as always, it will be tight.”