F1 News
Mercedes and Bottas don't share same opinion about balance of the car after friday
- GPblog.com
Mercedes were back at the top of the timesheets in both sessions on Friday, but still the team weren't satisfied with the behaviour of the car. Of course the second session in particular was messy and the teams weren't able to do much of their own running. Something that seems to bother Hamilton in particular.
Hamilton said afterwards that the car didn't feel great and he shares that sentiment with his team. "The car seems reasonably quick but the balance isn't great," Andrew Shovlin said in the team review on Friday. "Valtteri got a pretty good low fuel lap in before the red flags but Lewis couldn't extract the same grip so there's something for us to understand there."
Bottas suffers less from lack of grip
The fact that the teams in midfield, such as Racing Point, McLaren and Ferrari, were relatively close to Mercedes in the longruns also shows Shovlin as a sign that his team has not yet reached the desired level in Portugal.
Bottas doesn't entirely agree in his own retrospective. Although he acknowledges that there is little grip, he is quite satisfied with the balance. "The balance of the car was also pretty good. I was mainly struggling in the slow speed corners with the rear end of the car but it is not too far away from where I want it, as the lap times would also suggest."