Mercedes boss Toto Wolff believes Valterri Bottas will bounce back after his retirement at the Eifel Grand Prix due to mechanical failure.
Bottas started from pole position at Nurburgring on this Sunday and managed to contain his teammate’s Lewis Hamilton attacked on the first corner from the start.
However, the Finn blocked a wheel during the braking of the first corner a few laps later, damaging its tyres and forcing it to return to the pits earlier than expected to put on new tyres. Bottas then suffered a mechanical, which forced him to retire from the race, according to Mercedes’ engineers.
“It was a difficult race with very difficult and cool conditions. Valtteri and Lewis had a brilliant battle in the first corner, they faced each other hard, but they knew where the lines were.” Wolff said.
“The pace of Valtteri’s first few laps was amazing and it was a real shame that he suffered that wheel lock up and then had the problem with the power unit.” Wollf added.
According to reports, the Finn took his team radio to raise a concern over a loss of power. However, his race took a turn for the worse after the team asked Bottas to retire his car soon thereafter.
“We don’t know yet. We know that it looks like it was around the MGU-H but we haven’t found the root cause yet. We retired the car, not only because we wouldn’t have scored points but we wanted to damage the power unit.” Wolff said.
“I think we should be fine. It’s important to understand what actually happened as we introduced new power units this weekend and there’s still six races to go so we need to get on top of the problem.” he added.
