Valtteri Bottas believes his wretched Saudi Arabian Grand Prix could be attributed to inheriting floor damage on the opening lap of the race.
Having stormed through the pack on race day in Bahrain to finish eighth, the Alfa Romeo driver ended up last of all the classified runners at the Jeddah circuit.
The start of the race witnessed Pierre Gasly and Oscar Piastri make contact heading towards Turn 3, leading to the McLaren requiring a change of front wing at the end of the lap.
Bottas assumes that the incident caused him to collect a substantial piece of debris, contributing significantly to his uncompetitive pace thereafter.
“So much off the pace,” Bottas bemoaned. “I’m suspecting I ran over quite a large bit of debris on Lap 1 before Turn 4, and I could really feel it under the floor.
“Perhaps some damage, that’s my only explanation at the moment; obviously, we’ll have a look.”
After making a late pit stop in the race – his third in total – Bottas consequently became the only participant running to go a lap down on the race leader.
Unlike Zhou Guanyu in the sister car in Bahrain, Bottas was unable to utilise the fresh rubber to claim the fastest lap.
However, the ex-Mercedes man insists that the decision to make an additional stop was purely a roll of the dice to see if his damaged car would fare any better on a different compound of tyre.
“Yeah, just to see,” he answered when asked about the late trip to the pits. “Neither of the tyres I had before… I was just sliding around basically with [a] lack of grip.
“But with Softs maybe one or two laps was okay but then the same thing. So yeah something wasn’t right, so it felt like a long Sunday,” he added further.
While his race was likely handicapped by potential damage, Bottas had been struggling all weekend in comparison to his less experienced team-mate.
Although neither driver made it through into Q3 for the second consecutive weekend, Zhou was quicker in Q1 and then comfortably beat Bottas by two-tenths in Q2.
But the nature of the even bigger pace deficit in the race between the pair has led Bottas to think it was more serious than the contrasting fortunes being a continuation from qualifying.
“It seemed more serious than that,” he challenged. “I’m keen to find out what it is and why we were so much slower.”
Asked to assess the positives, Bottas suggested that Alfa Romeo missing the cut for a spot in Q3 by the same margin as the first race weekend shows it hasn’t gone backwards.
“At least the gap to Q3 was like in Bahrain, so in quali pace, we didn’t go backwards I think,” the Finn pondered. “But that’s about it.
“Now we need to figure out everything from this weekend and hopefully a better one in Australia.”
