Weather: Wet and cool
Temperature: Air: 22-24°C, Track: 33-38°C
Race Notes
• Felipe Massa finished 10th and Valtteri Bottas 12th in today’s Monaco Grand Prix
• Felipe was able to take advantage of changing conditions throughout the race to move forward from his grid position as he switched from wet to intermediate and then dry tyres. But Valtteri lost time in a pitstop and had further misfortune with traffic, which cost him track position
• Valtteri finished the race 11th but was demoted to 12th by a 10-second time penalty, applied by the stewards for causing a collision with Gutierrez
• Felipe remains seventh and Valtteri eighth in the Drivers’ Championship, while the team maintains fourth in the Constructors’ Championship
Rob Smedley, Head of Performance Engineering: We got a point today. It’s not exactly what we want but one is better than none. We want a lot more and we’ll try a lot harder to get them. We were quite quick on dry tyres in that midfield pack, and Felipe set the fastest lap on the intermediate tyres, so the pace of the car wasn’t as bad as last year, which is a positive. Felipe drove a very clean race and got us a point. We kept him out on the extreme wet tyres and he got out in front of the pack held up behind Werhlein, so his race was pretty much set from there. We pitted Valtteri early for inters to try to release a bit of pace on that tyre. Unfortunately, we had a rear jack failure in the pitstop which cost us because that put him out behind Werhlein. His race was very difficult from then on because he couldn’t pass him. We could have got him P7-9 without that. Generally, the race was bittersweet. We’ve made really good progress around Monaco compared to the last two years, but we haven’t been able to convert that into the amount of points we should have done. Looking forward, we’re going to Canada, Azerbaijan, Austria and Great Britain – a series of races we can capitalise on. We’re still fourth in the championship, and Red Bull didn’t score the amount of points they could have. We’ve got good developments coming, and we won’t be giving up the fight this season.
Valtteri Bottas: It was of course disappointing to finish outside the points. I think we really need to look at our strategy and why we lost a good position after the track was starting to dry. It’s possible we stopped at the wrong time, but the conditions were tricky today and it wasn’t an easy race.
Felipe Massa: It was a very tough day, having to start in the wet with laptimes of 1m40s and upwards. It was looking like a very difficult race to finish, so the positive thing is I managed that. It was definitely the most difficult race weekend of the season so far, but one point is better than zero.
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