Bottas makes fun of Red Bull over 'party mode' change

Valtteri Bottas poked fun at Red Bull after Mercedes again ran away with another front-row lock-out despite the recently hyped 'party mode' ban.

Lewis Hamilton claimed the 94th pole position of his career ahead of the Italian Grand Prix by setting the fastest lap in Formula 1 history, with Bottas finishing just 0.069secs adrift to give Mercedes its first front-row lock-out at Monza since 2016.

Much of the talk in the build-up to this weekend had centred on the FIA issuing a technical directive outlawing the so-called 'party mode' with regard to engine power, forcing all teams to run the same out across qualifying and the race. It is understood Red Bull were the architects of the change.

Asked whether Mercedes had missed the change, Bottas said: "The car feels good, the engine felt good, and like I've said before, it should be even better in the race."

Cheekily, Bottas then added: "Not sure how happy Red Bull is now with this engine change," which left Hamilton chuckling in the background.

As to his thoughts, Hamilton also made light of the situation as he said: "I don't even think we ever had a party mode. It's something someone else made up!"

As to whether the car felt any different to Spa without it, he added: "Who knows if we even used that mode in Spa anyway."

The gap to the rest, however, was still remarkable, with McLaren's Carlos Sainz a superb third, but with the Spaniard eight-tenths of a second behind Hamilton.

Questioned on whether he was surprised by the margin, Hamilton said: "I don't come into weekends with an expectation of how much gap we're going to have but, of course, I don't really understand it.

"We did say last week that when they brought in this rule to slow us down it wasn't really going to make a difference because we've a great, great car, and we're better in other areas.

"Just an incredible performance. This was definitely the best we've been here, we've really got the car in the sweet spot for this weekend."

Praising the team as always, Hamilton insisted that "continuously stepping forwards is such a hard thing to do".

He added: "I think people take for granted because we do it weekend in and weekend out, but I certainly don't."

Before you go...

"Nervous" Hamilton hails late set-up changes for record F1 lap

Shaking Sainz "nearly messed up" en route to career-equalling qualifying best

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