Bottas: "Because of that I lost about five seconds on Max"

Valtteri Bottas is convinced he could have finished second in the Portuguese Grand Prix if he had been spared sensor problems. The Mercedes driver claims the problem caused him to lose a total of five seconds.

"I really don't know why I didn't have the pace in the first stint. In terms of the start, the restart and so on, it was all fine from my side, but I could see pretty quickly that on the medium I didn't have the pace that Lewis and Max did," Bottas is quoted by Motorsport-Total.com. On the mediums, Bottas wasn't feeling too good.

Bottas on overtaking Verstappen

Eventually he swapped his tyres for the hard compound. Verstappen had stopped a lap earlier and because he had more temperature in his tyres he could overtake the W12 of the Finn quite easily. What did Bottas make of that experience? "It was pretty bad. But we knew that warming up the hard tyre would be quite difficult."

After a few laps Bottas managed to reduce the gap from six seconds to one and a half seconds. "When the tyres were up to temperature, it wasn't actually that bad, better than on medium. At one point I was catching up with Max, but then I had a problem with a sensor, so I suddenly lost power. So I lost about five seconds on Max," he explains.

Bottas on Wolff radio message

Just before Bottas' engine went into safety mode (due to the sensor) team boss Toto Wolff had appeared on the radio. He informed his driver that he was the fastest man on the track and could start chasing Verstappen. "He's been on the pit radio more often and said something," Bottas said of that. "That is very supportive and shows there is support and passion behind it. Of course I always give everything I can on the track."