Mercedes has defended Valtteri Bottas’ performance at the US Grand Prix, emphasizing the difficulty of overtaking in Austin, Texas.
Bottas, Formula One’s new ICEman, had to deal with his third engine penalty in four race weekends, dropping five positions from P4 to P9 after switching to his sixth ICE of the season.
By the time the chequered flag flew, Bottas had only moved to P6, adding only eight points to his score and allowed Red Bull to gain ground in the Constructors’ standings following a 1-3 finish for Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez, respectively.
Of course, Lewis Hamilton was sandwiched between them in P2.
Bottas was prepared himself for a stiff test ahead of the start, citing Ferrari and McLaren as difficult cars to overtake.
Given Bottas’ slow progress through the field, questions about his latest performance were unavoidable. However, Mercedes’ motorsport strategy director, James Vowles, could not be critical of the Finn because it was clear that many other drivers were struggling to overcome the COTA circuit’s characteristics.
“It wasn’t unique to Valtteri, you saw this up and down the field,” Vowles said in Mercedes’ post-Austin debrief about the difficulties of overtaking.
“If I take the example of Verstappen and Lewis, in stint one of the race Verstappen was seven tenth behind Lewis all stint clearly faster but unable to overtake.
“Right at the end of the race, Lewis had a tyre advantage to Verstappen when Verstappen was dropping off the tyre curves and Lewis couldn’t get close enough to overtake.
“It’s difficult on circuits and obviously it becomes more exaggerated on certain circuits relative to others.
“In Austin, you are getting a lot of tyre overheating. Everyone is and when you are the car behind, you suffer more from that than the car in front of you.
“You are sliding around on the tyres, you lose downforce and the closer you get to the car in front the more downforce you lose and therefore the more you slide around on the tyres, the more overheating you get.
“The DRS is clearly a tool that enables us therefore to get through a car when you have a large performance differential, but for it to be effective you have to be within half a second, six tenths on corner exit before you open DRS for it to work.
“And in the case of Valtteri it was very, very hard to do that.”
On race day at the United States Grand Prix, Vowles also highlighted how time-consuming overtaking was, with drivers needing to back off and cool their tyres before preparing another attempt on the car in front.
He added: “You saw in fact at the end of the race what he did is back off from Sainz, allow his tyres to cool down and then attacked one more time and did now get the position and that’s why.
“It’s very, very difficult for a number of laps to sit there and wait as your tyres are overheating. You’ve actually got to let them recover and try one more time.”
With five races left in his Mercedes tenure, Bottas is in third place in the Drivers’ Championship. He’ll probably stay there as well, since he’s 35 points ahead of Sergio Perez in P4 and 90.5 points behind teammate Lewis Hamilton in P2.
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