Valtteri Bottas conceded he needs a “miracle” to win the Formula 1 title this year after arguably the most impressive moments of his season turned into the cruellest blow yet.
Bottas beat Lewis Hamilton to pole by a quarter of a second at the Nurburgring (only two of Bottas’s 14 poles have come with a bigger margin) then outmuscled him after briefly losing the lead at the start.
It was a show of strength against Hamilton that Bottas has been lacking in crucial moments this season and in the past, and even impressed his team-mate.
“I moved as wide to the outside but he came back and he did an amazing job,” said Hamilton.
“I remember coming out of that corner thinking, ‘Good on you, man. I’m impressed. That was good’.”
Wrestling back control of the race should have been the foundation for Bottas scoring a second successive victory and justifying his “fuck you” message to critics in Russia two weeks ago.
“I think I still had all the chances for the win because the lock-up made me to commit to the two-stop quite early” :: Valtteri Bottas
But his race unravelled either side of the first pitstops, initially with a lock-up under braking for Turn 1 that flat-spotted his front right, handed the lead to Hamilton and forced Bottas to pit at the end of the lap.
Bottas blamed the error on light drizzle falling at parts of the track.
He said: “I felt less grip on the braking and it was a really sudden lock up and of course being the first car out there always approaching that corner [first].
“I’m sure Lewis saw pretty quickly that I locked up so I’m sure he had chance to react. But that’s how it goes, it was a mistake but also tricky conditions.”
Once he’d pitted, Bottas’s race went from bad to worse to over.
He lost more ground when a kindly-timed virtual safety car allowed Hamilton and Max Verstappen to pit without losing much time.
But then Bottas’s race was wrecked when he lost power, and eventually retired with a suspected MGU-H failure.
Hamilton’s victory, a Michael Schumacher-equalling 91st in F1, left Bottas 69 points behind in the championship with just six races left.
“It’s disappointing of course,” he said when asked by The Race about how he felt following the latest setback in a tricky season. “It’s just very disappointing.
“It’s one of these things that you can’t do anything for. Obviously I did have the lock-up before that but I think I still had all the chances for the win because that made me to commit to the two-stop quite early and I think two-stop eventually at the end was the best strategy.
“So I knew that there was all to play for. But then the engine thing, I couldn’t believe it.
“There’s no point now non-stop calculating points because it’s pretty big gap” :: Valtteri Bottas
“I understand the gap to Lewis is pretty big in terms of points. So definitely would need a miracle.
“But as always no point to give up. I need to keep the bar high for me and keep trying and we’ll see, but just disappointed is the best word.”
Victory would still have left Bottas with an unfancied title chance, 37 points adrift, but retirement was far from what he deserved from a strong weekend and that is what could make this defeat more galling than others.
The Finn has had to pick himself up from several setbacks this season, chief among them the sustained pummelling from Hamilton in terms of regular qualifying and race defeats.
This was shaping up to be Bottas’s strongest weekend of the season as he had to beat Hamilton in a straight fight in qualifying and the early phase of the race, but the mistake under pressure – even if the very light rain was a factor – was an unfortunate setback before circumstances well out of his control delivered the ultimate hammer-blow.
Bottas said a persistent mindset is “built in me so there’s no chance I will give up” and he will need to tap into whatever reserves of mental resilience he has remaining after a painful descent from defeating Hamilton wheel-to-wheel to an error while leading, to bad luck with a safety car moving the race further out of reach, to being forced into retirement.
But he can take heart from the “good fun” of the early battle and keeping his foot in off-track to forcefully hold the position into Turn 2: “I wasn’t going to give that position easy so I just decided to go for it from outside.”
And if Bottas can set aside the cruel nature of how his Eifel GP developed, he can at least be confident of fighting Hamilton on a race-by-race basis and not letting this season end with a whimper.
“I think that’s the best mindset,” he said. “There’s no point now non-stop calculating points because it’s pretty big gap.
“I really need to take it race by race and always set a target for each weekend and do everything I can for that.
“The mindset for me not to give up it’s built in me so there’s no chance I will.
“Then in a couple of months we’re a lot wiser on how the season went overall.”
