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Bottas blames bad luck for not being in title fight

16:52, 25 Oct 2018

byAdam Newton

With Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel so far ahead of everybody else, it seems as if they don’t have team mates in exactly the same machinery as they do.

But they are there, and Hamilton’s team mate Valtteri Bottas believes he could have been in the title battle if it wasn’t for bad luck early on in the season.

After Kimi Raikkonen’s victory in Austin, Bottas is now the only driver in the top three teams yet to record a win, despite finishing second in seven races.

He has had races ruined from potential winning positions all season, the most notable being a puncture on the last few laps in Baku, retiring from second in Austria, being hit on the first lap by Sebastian Vettel in France and more recently, having to give up a win for Hamilton in Russia.

And now Bottas believes that without the bad luck, he could’ve been challenging his team mate for the title: “I don’t know in deep detail how the points would have been,” Bottas said.

“I don’t like to calculate those things because in the end after each race that is the situation you’re in and you’re always trying to then make the best out of the future.

“But when you have many setbacks in a row then at some point it kind of becomes a bit of a joke and that’s for me how I felt at some point this year.

“If we would be now with not a big points difference or anything then for sure we would be both fighting flat-out for the championship but we’re not, he is and I am not.”