Valtteri Bottas hoping his luck ‘evens out’ after two punctures in Bahrain F1 GP

Valtteri Bottas says he hopes his bad luck in F1 'evens out' after suffering two punctures in the Bahrain Grand Prix.

Bottas endured a torrid Bahrain Grand Prix, dropping to sixth place from second before the race was red-flagged due to Romain Grosjean’s heavy crash at Turn 3.

He then was promoted to fourth on the reformed grid but was forced to stop under the Safety Car after picking up a puncture, dropping him to 16th place.

From then on, Bottas was stuck in traffic and could only recover to eighth place as Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton stormed to his 11th victory of the season.

It’s not the first time Bottas has suffered misfortune in 2020 and the Finn joked he needs to stop feeding a black cat in the hope his bad luck stops.

“You know, I have a place in the south of France and there’s this black cat that keeps coming every day,” Bottas said. “Maybe the issue is that I started feeding it so I can promise you there will be no more food for him anymore!

“If I would make a list of the unlucky events I’ve had this year, happening in the races and in the practice sessions, it would be a very long list. It’s in between if I cry or laugh, but I’d rather laugh. On some of those things there’s nothing you can do and I’m not a superstitious guy – I was just joking about the cat.

“It’s just that it sometimes happens and for some people that kind of bad luck can last many years or just a short moment. I hope things even out at some point.”

Bottas cited overheating tyres as the reason for his inability to make gains through the field and felt a switch to the hard tyres for the final stint would have served him better.

“The soft we didn’t really find it a very interesting tyre because it could take just a few laps and then it would drop massively. Even after a few laps it would a lot slower than the medium tyre, so it was never an option. 

“The Medium set we put on the end, we actually only changed three tyres and it was not that old, it had done just a few laps. The first ten laps in the last stint they felt OK, but with the medium tyre I felt there was quite a bit more overheating than I felt the drivers on the hard tyre were experiencing, because they could keep going for quite a lot longer, as Ricciardo did. For me the hard tyre was the tyre to be on.”