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Mercedes needs "hard work" to unlock full potential - Bottas
Mercedes still has "hard work" to do to unlock the full potential of its updates before the opening Formula 1 race in Melbourne, says Valtteri Bottas.
Jonathan Noble
Edited: Mar 10, 2017, 11:38 AM
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The Brackley-based team has not had the perfect second week of running at Barcelona, with some of its developments not delivering the steps the team had hoped for.
With non-executive director Niki Lauda having said that Mercedes needed a decent final day to start getting better answers on its car, Bottas too thinks there is a good amount of work needed for get the W08 in to the right specification for Melbourne.
When asked by Motorsport.com about how far off the team is with its updates, Bottas said: "We have had so many different upgrades and, okay, yes, maybe some of them haven't been perfect. Some have been over-performing, some have been maybe slightly underperforming.
"It's been affecting the car balance, things like that. And once you put new stuff into the car, it's not like it's suddenly better.
"There's some things that we definitely need to unlock, and I'm confident that we will find most out of the package and it will be as good as planned.
"It just needs hard work. It's been very nice to see how the team is reacting to different things - if we find something is not working quite as it should, everyone is then flat out in Brackley and here, sorting things out.
"So I'm sure we can get most out of all the stuff we're bringing to the car in Melbourne."
Close to Hamilton
The focus on firming up the Melbourne specification has come against the backdrop of Bottas needing to get up to speed with his new team.
Lauda had suggested that Bottas was now just two tenths of a second adrift of Hamilton on single lap pace, with more work needed to match him over race distances.
Asked how he felt he was stacking up against the three-time champion, Bottas said: "To be honest we've been running always quite a different programme during the day, but definitely in some occasions there has been some good data to compare to, which has been very valuable.
"So it's been very interesting and I think so far it looks quite close. But it's only testing and I'm not sure either of us has been doing qualifying laps or actually being in the race situation.
"So far what I've seen is I've made good progress all the time. A lot better today than on the first day of testing, for example, and I just need to keep working like this and making sure the progress continues."
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