Valtteri Bottas has revealed some of the reasons behind his woeful lack of pace compared to Cadillac Formula 1 team-mate Sergio Perez last time out in Baku. <\/p>\n
Bottas was on average over a whopping 1.7 seconds slower than Perez per lap at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the largest race day intra-team deficit of 2026 so far. Even his single fastest lap was 1.489s slower than Perez. <\/p>\n
Bottas ended up in the wall on the final lap as his car\u2019s deployment pattern \u201cgot a bit confused\u201d because he went down the Turn 1 escape road, then because of the extra distance travelled his rear brakes didn\u2019t work going into the Turn 15 left-hander, where he nosed into the barriers.<\/p>\n
But what was more worrying was the alarming lack of pace before then, with Perez close to lapping Bottas before the latter’s crash.<\/p>\n
\u201cI understand it looked pretty bad from the outside and felt pretty bad in the car as well,\u201d Bottas said on Thursday in Malaysia. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere was just no way to keep up with the pack. I tried everything during the race, and got lots of feedback on where I am losing the time. A lot of it was on the straights, but also a big chunk was just all around the lap in the corners. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s why I just kept pushing until the end and that’s why I had to lock up on the last lap into Turn 1. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut yeah, the main thing was we saw already in practice that I was lacking pace. I couldn’t carry the same speed through the corners as Checo, so we changed a lot for the qualifying, including some dampers and the floor, and it actually felt a lot better. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut then the ride again during the race degraded quite a lot… Again, we’ve changed a lot of things, so I think it’s something to do with dampers degging with heat, the floor… We are still lacking a bit of pressure tappings here and there, so we still don’t have the full information on aero parts that I’m used to from the past. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou can immediately see if you’re down or up, but now there are some bits of the floor where we are blind. But for me, feeling-wise, it was more the ride – that, in combination with the power steering that was degging throughout the weekend. So I was really then also struggling to feel the car throughout the race. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo those things combined. And then the [power unit] difference was probably bigger than we thought, at least from the data. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe’ve got a number in theory, but that’s new engine versus new one, of the new and old spec. So yeah, I think those combined. I was pretty slow.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201850\/50\u2019 if Bottas gets Ferrari ADUO 2<\/p>\n
The power unit difference is in reference to Perez having the upgraded ADUO 2 Ferrari engine in Baku while Bottas doesn\u2019t yet have it. <\/p>\n
This was previously described as a \u201csmall difference\u201d, but as Bottas says the upgrade may be more powerful than first thought.<\/p>\n
Bottas says it\u2019s \u201c50\/50\u201d if his ADUO 2 engine arrives in time for him to run it at Sepang; if not, he\u2019ll have to wait until next week in Singapore. <\/p>\n
Team-mate Perez won\u2019t be running it this weekend, swapping to a different power unit in his pool in order to save it for a weekend when it will be more beneficial. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe took a decision where we feel we got the best shot at it,\u201d Perez explained. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s why we’re taking a bit of a hit here. But we hope that it will pay us back. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not too optimistic about this weekend. So we decided to save it.\u201d <\/p>\n
As Perez alluded, the Cadillac drivers are braced for a difficult weekend because Sepang poses two challenges the Cadillac struggles with in particular: tyre overheating and high-speed corners. <\/p>\n
As Perez explains, the Cadillac has \u201ca massive lack of load in the car and a lot of drag\u201d right now. <\/p>\n
\u201cIn Baku, I basically stayed on the overtake mode for the entire race and therefore I was able to stay with the others,\u201d Perez said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut when I overtook them, I was just a passenger because I had no straightline speed. So we have two big issues: load and a lot of drag. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut we always knew this first year was going to be tricky.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Valtteri Bottas has revealed some of the reasons behind his woeful lack of pace compared to Cadillac Formula…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":916295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-916294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=916294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/916295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=916294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=916294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=916294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}