Valtteri Bottas enjoyed his first morning on track as a Mercedes driver, completing 79 laps on his Silver Arrows debut, hailing it as an”amazing” and “special” day.
Bottas told reporters after completing the morning session and handing the W08 to teammate Lewis Hamilton for the afternoon stanza, “They did an amazing job over the winter. Obviously I started in a bit more than a month ago but what I’ve seen has been very impressive and how well the car has been running it’s been impressive and hopefully stays that way.”
“For us the main thing is to get the mileage now and if there’s any issues to come hopefully we can find them out.”
“It was very good to be in a proper testing working conditions with the team and it was very special to do the first few laps, and yeah very much enjoyed you know starting the testing of 2017 and also a new era for F1 with the new cars. Very interesting.”
“For us at least in the first test the main thing is to get a lot of mileage. A lot of laps. At the same time we’re doing a lot of mechanical testing with the car. We’re doing long runs, and always checking something for each run so it was very valuable for me and for the team,” added Bottas.