Valtteri Bottas is disappointed with his performance after qualifying fifth for Sunday’s Malaysia Grand Prix.
After some troubled and interrupted running on Friday trying some new aerodynamic parts on both cars, Bottas continued to run the updates into qualifying while team-mate Lewis Hamilton reverted back to the old spec setup.
“It’s been a difficult weekend for us and we’ve been quite far behind at times,” said Bottas. “Compared to yesterday we made a step forward; today was a lot better, but still not good enough for me.
“Lewis and I did end up with completely different cars in terms of aero package for the qualifying. It seemed to be working for him but not so much for me.”
Between Q2 and Q3 Hamilton managed to improve his time by nearly nine tenths of a second, while Bottas was not able to wrestle the same performance out of the W08 across the two sessions.
The Finn is keen to analyse why he could not get the best out his Mercedes compared to his team-mate, but is keen to perform in the race to claw back the deficit to those ahead of him.
“Qualifying wasn’t going too bad until the second session,” added Bottas. “But in qualy three, everyone else could improve quite a bit but I couldn’t. We need to analyse everything, it is too early to say why I couldn’t improve from Q2 to Q3.
“I’m feeling very disappointed after the qualifying, but tomorrow is a new day. It is going to be a challenge for us; so far, our long run performance has not been great this weekend. But we will try and give it everything we can.”
