Bottas says Mercedes need to improve before qualifying

Valtteri Bottas says that he is struggling with his car after a tough Friday by his standards, managing only fourth and fifth in FP1 and FP2 respectively. Bottas needs a positive result in Mexico to keep his championship hopes alive, with the Finn currently 64 points behind his teammate Lewis Hamilton with just four races left to go.

Hamilton needs 14 more points than Bottas to secure the title and the Finn will be desperate to stop that happening, but his pace so far at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez hasn't been particularly impressive.

He revealed that he had a tough day on Friday, saying: "It was not the easiest day for us; the track felt very slippery and I was struggling with the balance of the car in the first session. We made some improvements for FP2 and the balance felt a lot better afterwards, but we were still lacking a bit of grip.

"Both Ferrari and Red Bull seem to be strong on this track, but there’s still a lot of things we can improve for the weekend. The softer compounds suffer quite a bit on this tarmac; it was pretty bad last year, but we made some improvements so that this year I was actually able to get a few laps in of the softs.

"However, the hard tyre I ran in the end was pretty solid and more consistent – it makes it quite interesting as we might see a lot of different strategies on Sunday."