Bottas ‘paid the price’ for mistake which led to FP1 shunt

Mercedes Formula 1 driver Valtteri Bottas says he paid the price for making a mistake as he crashed during opening practice for the Singapore Grand Prix.

Bottas lost the back-end of his Mercedes W10 coming out of Turn 19 and slammed straight into the barriers on the exit of the corner, causing heavy damage.

It left Mercedes with a big repair job to get Bottas’ crash ahead of second practice, but the team was able to send the Finn back out at the start of FP2.

“It was a tricky one, had a bit of an off moment in FP1 which ended my running a bit early, but I really was feeling OK until then,” Bottas said.

“I just lost the back-end in one of the corners, and obviously here with no run-offs, you pay the price. It can happen I guess.”

Bottas ended up with the fourth-fastest time but was 1.121s off the pace of session-leader and teammate Lewis Hamilton, leading Bottas to suspect his car was not running at 100 percent following his crash.

“P2, not sure really what was going on, was lacking pace every single run, every tyre compound, so I’m not quite sure if everything was right in the car,” he explained.

“We need to have a look. It felt like I couldn’t go any quicker, but I was one second off the pace. A bit tricky.

“The only thing I could really feel was quite a bit of friction in the steering system, struggled to feel the car properly.

“We’ll look at everything for sure, but I doubt everything was 100 percent. Obviously need to have a look at what I can do better as well.”

“For sure you need to push always, and the biggest push in Q3, obviously try and minimise the damage in practice.

“I think it’s going to be close between the three teams, but Lewis was definitely on form today.”