Valtteri Bottas completed 53 laps on his last testing session in the car to give himself a testing total of 628, the highest number of any driver. He finished fourth fastest on Friday with a best time of 1:19.845.
Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team were one of a number of garages who spent their final day at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya undertaking intensive car preparation and tyre analysis ahead of the Australian Grand Prix in just two weeks time.
The Finn appears to have settled in nicely at his new team, and has found the past couple of weeks useful for getting to know his crew and the way they work.
“I got in a reasonable amount of laps on my last morning in the car and leave testing feeling confident and ready to race,” he said. “I feel that as a team we have been able to improve how we work together, that we have a great spirit and real will to win.
“It’s been so nice over these past two weeks to see how we operate as a group, both on and off the race track. Thanks to everyone in Brackley and Brixworth for creating this beautiful package. I hope we can extract the maximum from it straight from the word go in Melbourne.”
Bottas joined Mercedes from Williams Martini Racing, and despite lacking in race wins has certainly shown a good turn of pace and thrown down the gauntlet to teammate Lewis Hamilton.
“We’ve been testing lots of things, so it’s going to take a long time to analyse everything that we’ve done,” he added. “I’ve had a massive learning curve over these eight days and that will continue but I can’t wait for the start lights to go out in Melbourne.”
