Tyre temperature the "main issue" behind Bottas' qualifying struggles

The Finn could only set a time good enough for eighth as he ended up over two seconds off the pace of polesitter Max Verstappen and Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton in a dramatic, wet qualifying at Spa. 

Bottas, who struggled with similar tyre warm up issues on the intermediate compound at Imola, explained that a combination of a slow out-lap and low downforce set-up played a role in his poor Q3 display. 

“Definitely the set-up wasn’t really for the wet,” Bottas conceded. 

“I think, as a team, we were quite on a low wing level, so I hope that tomorrow at some point it’s going to be dry and we’ll get some overtaking done. 

“But I was sure that the car was still capable of getting into the top three. Sure Lewis is in the top three, but the issue for me in Q3 was that on the slow lap, to cool the tyres, I had to slow down too much to let other cars through, and I just lost front tyre temperature. 

“And I immediately started locking up in the last lap and that’s why the lap time wasn’t that great.

“I think strategically we were not bad,” he added. “I think we were in a good place. But for me, just having to back off too much in the slow lap, that cost me time and that was the main issue.”

To make matters worse for Bottas, he will drop five places on the grid for causing the Turn 1 carnage at the Hungarian GP last time out. 

Asked if it will just be a race to survive in, he replied: “If the conditions are like this, yes, because just making it to the end will probably get you quite far. 

“There will be opportunities. I’m not in the best place for the start but you never know. Today showed anything can happen, and probably, tomorrow will.”