Valtteri Bottas was “not really pleased” with his Friday ahead of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
After the cancellation of Free Practice 1, drivers only got the one session with Bottas struggling and only finishing fifth fastest behind the two Scuderia Ferrari’s, Mercedes AMG-Petronas team-mate Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen.
The nature of the Baku City Circuit means it is important to find a rhythm early and the Finnish driver feels he needs more time to get into the groove.
“It’s been a fairly disrupted day which made FP2 more important than usual.
“We tried to maximise the time on track, adding a few more laps to our original plan for the afternoon after FP1 was suspended.
“I’m not really pleased with the laps I did, but it’s always a bit tricky to find the rhythm in Baku and it takes a bit of time.”
A lot of drivers struggled during the session with the run off areas being used at a regular rate.
Bottas needed to use the escape road at turn two on his first flying lap as he locked up his front right and went straight on before spinning the car round to continue and he said getting temperature into the tyres was difficult but the track evolution should help with that issue during qualifying and the race.
“It wasn’t easy to get the Medium compound up to the right temperatures today, but corner speeds will increase due to track evolution, so we should be able to get a bit more energy into the tyres tomorrow.
“Our long runs felt good and the pace didn’t look too bad either, but we are a bit behind on single lap pace.
“Ferrari looked really strong, particularly on the short runs, so it will be a tough fight tomorrow.”des
