Mercedes developments creating tyre issues - Bottas

Valtteri Bottas has suggested Mercedes' attempts to rectify a longstanding weakness of overheating tyres in hot conditions has now left the team vulnerable when temperatures fall.

At warmer races on the calendar, Mercedes has historically found it more difficult to manage its tyres than other teams as was evidenced at the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix last year when Max Verstappen was able to capitalise on the problems to take victory for Red Bull.

In Bahrain, Mercedes appeared to have fixed its problem but after Bottas struggled with tyre warm-up at Imola in far cooler temperatures, the Finn is fearful the team has gone too far in the opposite direction.

“I think it is a bit overall a thing with our car," said Bottas. "Over the years we quite often struggled in hot conditions and cold has been normally good.

"So we are really trying to develop the car that we don’t overheat the tyres but that becomes overall a negative that if we need to get temperature quickly into the tyres, some other cars can do it better than us."

Bottas' woes at Imola stemmed from a lacklustre qualifying, where he was able only to set the eighth fastest time whilst team-mate Lewis Hamilton qualified on pole.

“For me, personally compared to Lewis, it was slower than average," Bottas conceded.

"Sometimes you get it to work like, for me in Q1, when I did a much faster time than in Q3 I got them to work but for some reason, I just couldn’t get them to work in the same way in Q3.

“It’s all about one or two degrees surface or core tyre temperature. It’s hard to explain."

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