A 'good day' for Bottas despite late problems

Valtteri Bottas was still left with a good feeling from Mercedes' latest Formula 1 car despite taking what technical director James Allison has described as "an early bath" in pre-season testing on Thursday.

After Lewis Hamilton completed a mammoth 106 laps in the morning session, Bottas followed up with 77 in the afternoon before his running was curtailed by an electrical issue with the W11. Bottas was on course to complete a race simulation when the problem struck, leaving him at the bottom of the 13-driver timesheet.

Despite the slightly shortened day, Bottas said: "We completed 77 laps, which is a good number.

"But obviously running was cut short because of an issue, which made the day a bit trickier. It was a good day of learning more about the car. We got some good mileage in and I almost completed a full race simulation.

"So there was a lot of good experience gained from that and lots of data for us to investigate ahead of tomorrow.

"For me, personally, there are many learnings to take away from that race simulation and look into further. The car felt good and I'm looking forward to continuing the running tomorrow morning. Hopefully, we will have a clean day."

Allison, meanwhile, is confident what transpired is nothing more than the kind of glitch testing is designed to iron out.

"We are all a little disappointed to have taken an early bath today," said Allison.

"But we console ourselves with the fact that the problem we encountered will quickly be resolved and we managed a healthy 183 laps before encountering it. That is, after all, why we go testing.

"It's encouraging to see that, for the second day running, the car felt honest, good and reasonably speedy."

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