Valtteri Bottas Wins Russian Grand Prix

The strongest showings of the day were Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel with 1.33.194 and his team mate Kimi Raikkonen delivering a 1:33.253.

Bottas caught traffic ahead of the pitstops, allowing Vettel to cut the deficit to 2.5s before Mercedes called Bottas in at the end of lap 27 to swap ultra-softs for supersofts.

“Right now we need to understand where the speed was this weekend – where I went wrong with the setup – and then come back for the next race”. Teammate, Jack Beckman was second, followed by J.R. Todd and Matt Hagan. He finished 25.3 seconds behind the Finn.

Valtteri Bottas stepped into the shoes of a champion when he joined Mercedes and in Russian Federation on Sunday the Finn finally got that winning feeling. Sauber’s Marcus Ericsson and Pascal Wehrlein finished 12th and 13th respectively, and it was McLaren’s Stoffel Vandoorne ending the race at 14th.

Bottas time in the race was 1:28:08.743. “It’s too early to talk about the championship in any detail”. Alonso didn’t make it to the race start, with his car’s engine packing up on his way to the grid.

Vettel continued to chip away, and did close to just under a second at one point, but hampered by Felipe Massa’s Williams on the last lap, could not get a chance to overtake. However, further back, Haas driver Romain Grosjean’s auto made contact with the Renault of Jolyon Palmer, ending the race for both.

The German waited another seven laps before his stop on lap 34, the idea being to have fresher tyres on which he could push harder and hopefully pressure Bottas over the remaining 18 laps.

“It was a tough race again today with Ferrari, but we managed to stay in front”. The fifth spot was occupied by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, while his team-mate Daniel Ricciardo had issues with his rear brake and thus did not finish. Eighth went to Renault’s Nico Hulkenberg, with Massa and Toro Rosso’s Carlos Sainz claiming the final points.

The man on pole at the Russian GP, however, was Sebastian Vettel. Hamilton is second with 73 points.

Sitting third in the standings after four races, could a world championship be within Bottas’ grasp? Bottas credited his win to the work his team had put in and expects stiffer challenges from Ferrari, who are point behind leaders Mercedes with 135 points.

“There’s a lot of rumours around [regarding the Red Bull update]”.

For now, however, he said he is content to take it one race at a time and enjoy his successes.

In other F1 news, it’s been confirmed that Sauber will switch from Ferrari to Honda for supply of its power units starting from the 2018 season.