F1: Bottas shows strength of car, driver by holding off Vettel
Valtteri Bottas once again showed his class in Bahrain when he managed to hold off Sebastian Vettel in the closing part of the race to claim fourth place.
The Williams driver managed to cover every move by Vettel, and focused on getting out of the corners well.
“It was a good battle in the end and I'm really pleased that we could get a few extra points by keeping him behind,” said the Finn. “There was not much happening in the race before that, then a bit more action at the end.
“I thought it was going to be a lonely one at some point, then it was really nice to have that fight with Sebastian, and nice to keep him back.
“I really tried to do everything to get the lines correct and always get good exit speed for the straights, and using all the boost with the engine for the bits that mattered.”
Bottas says that Williams is making progress, even if the team is still clearly in third place.
“I think we can see that we were a bit closer to them than in China. Obviously we still have a bit of work to do because if it would be a clean race for the top two teams we're clearly still third.
“We could work better with the option tire, so the second stint was much more competitive than what we had in China, and even in the beginning it was not too bad, the Ferrari and Mercedes were not getting miles away. So progress, but we need more.”
Regarding the next race in Barcelona he said: “We do have some updates there, and obviously we have testing there as well. It didn't feel too bad for our car, and with getting updates for our car hopefully we can be a bit closer again to Ferrari and Mercedes. I think this race showed that we made a small step forward from China.”
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