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maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 20 MARCH 2019 20 FORMULA 1 SPORTS "I don't know what just happened," Valtteri Bottas said after winning the season-opening Australian Grand Prix with as dominant a drive as Formula 1 has seen for some time. Lewis Hamilton said he had "some ideas" about why he was 20 seconds be- hind his team-mate on a picture-perfect sunny afternoon in Melbourne's Albert Park. But rare is the day when the five- time world champion is beaten as com- prehensively as this, especially by some- one in the same car. And down in fourth place, Sebastian Vettel, the man many thought came into the weekend as the favourite, was reduced to asking his Ferrari team over the radio: "Why are we so slow?" They said they had no idea. Hamilton and Ferrari have some thinking to do before the next race in Bahrain on 31 March, but Bottas' vic- tory has just introduced a new narrative into the 2019 F1 season. And it is per- haps not one that many expected. Bottas was a man on a mission For Bottas, this victory was nothing less than redemption after an excep- tionally difficult 2018 in which he failed to win a race while Hamilton took 11 and a fifth world title. The 29-year-old Finn left for the win- ter a chastened man, reflecting on what he described as the most difficult and disappointing year of his career. He went on holiday to Chile, and then back home to Finland, with a new beard and a new attitude. He was determined not to let the same thing happen again. From the start of the weekend in Aus- tralia, Bottas was a man on a mission. Hamilton topped all three practice sessions but the margin to Bottas was never large, and when it mattered in the top 10 qualifying shoot-out, Bottas came out of the blocks like a startled cat. His first flying lap was more than 0.5secs quicker than Hamilton. Bottas failed to improve on his second run, al- lowing Hamilton to sneak pole position, but a marker had been laid down. Come the start of the race, there was another one. A mediocre start from Hamilton, a flying one from Bottas, and the Finn had the lead into the first cor- ner. From that moment on, he never looked like being beaten - the pleasure it gave him was made clear by a post-race radio message, in which he offered a four-letter salute "to whom it may con- cern". The people he was addressing it to, he said, would know who they were. "Every year you learn as a person, about yourself, what works for you and what doesn't," Bottas said. "Preparation includes how you rest, how you do your spare time, travel plans and all sorts, trying to optimise again everything for this year. "It is quite difficult to explain what has been going on last winter inside my head but something changed about how I feel about things and life in general." The difference from the start of last year could not be more extreme. In 2018, Bottas crashed heavily in quali- fying and finished eighth in the race in what many viewed as a lacklustre per- formance. He had some strong races after that, particularly early in the season as Ham- ilton took time to get up to speed, and should have had a couple of wins, but luck never went for him. And by the time he was leading the Russian Grand Prix, he was out of title contention, and Mercedes boss Toto Wolff had no real choice but to order him to hand victory to Hamilton. "Since I started to work with drivers 15 years go I tried to comprehend what is going on in their brains and I don't," Wolff said on Sunday. "How he recovered from being writ- ten off, not up for the job in the second half of the season last year, scoring one of the most dominant victories in recent days, just shows us human potential and how much it is a mind game. "It is for me also a bit of fairytale - don't let others break you, believe in yourself. And he has just showed us the whole weekend." Vettel said: "He always had the speed. Last year did not go well for him for many reasons. He won the race, he was straight away far away from us, which is not good news for us. But he is a nice guy so I am really happy for him today." Whether Bottas is really capable of mounting a consistent challenge to Hamilton over a full season remains to be seen, but he starts the season with an eight-point advantage, so he has at least put himself in the best position to prove it. Why was Hamilton so far back? Once Hamilton had lost the start, he was not going to beat Bottas anyway. But there were extenuating circum- stances for Hamilton's deficit at the end of the race. He was just over a second behind Bot- tas in the first laps, but he suffered floor damage on lap four - he said he did not know why, as he had not gone wide any- where - and lost rear downforce. Whether this was the reason or it was simply a poor balance, Hamilton was complaining about oversteer over the radio during his first stint. The team took some front wing out of the car in his stop, but still it was tending towards lacking rear grip in the second stint. Most of all, his early pit stop to cover Vettel also put him on the back foot, as it meant a much longer second stint than planned. "I naturally had a lot more pace in the car," he said. "I would have kept the gap at three seconds but then the damage happened and I started to fall back. "With the super-early stop I knew from then the race was done. I knew I was going to be in trouble on the long run so I drove well off the pace to make sure at the end of the race I still had life left in the tyres." Valtteri Bottas' Australian GP win 'makes new F1 season interesting' Bottas beat Mercedes teammate Hamilton to win the Australian GP

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