24/05/2015
NEWS STORY
Valtteri Bottas finished 14th and Felipe Massa 15th in today's Monaco Grand Prix. Felipe had contact with another car at Turn 1 causing a front-right tyre puncture. His first lap pitstop for new tyres and a new front wing resulted in him re-joining at the back of the pack and unable to fight for any points. Starting P16, Valtteri struggled for pace and was further compromised by a late safety car. The team heads into the next race in Canada confident that the FW37 will show a marked improvement in performance and will be back challenging for points.
Valtteri Bottas: This has been a tough weekend that ended in an even tougher race. We tried everything to try and get some points but with the pace we had it wasn't possible today. We tried the two-stop strategy which never really came to us, with the safety car coming at just the wrong time. There are not too many positives from the weekend but plenty we can learn from as to why we struggled. We know we still have a good car and go to races in the next few weeks where we should be able to demonstrate our true performance.
Felipe Massa: Today was a very frustrating day and a race to forget for us. My race was effectively over in Turn 1, with another car pushing me over and I was left with a lot of damage to my tyre and front wing. The pitstop I had to make on Lap 1 put me right at the back of the pack and I spent the rest of the race looking out for blue flags. The car has not had its usual performance all weekend but we know that we are heading to tracks in Canada and Austria that suit our car and we should be back fighting towards the front.
Rob Smedley, Head of Performance Engineering: It was quite a difficult weekend and we were nowhere near where we should be. At Monaco, if qualifying doesn't go well you have partly made your bed so we knew getting points was going to be tough. It wasn't a great race for us but we can't dwell too much as we are out of position. We have to look at all areas to see what went wrong here with the inherent car performance and set-up. We cannot return here in 2016 and repeat this performance. We now have to focus firmly on the next three races. We have a really good package and some healthy upgrades coming soon so we look forward to coming back stronger in Canada.
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