Mercedes' Head of Trackside Engineering Andrew Shovlin has explained why Valtteri Bottas found it so difficult to overtake during the Emilia Romagna GP. The Finn started the race from eighth place and, despite driving a much quicker car than most, failed to make any progress during the race before being involved in a huge crash as he was being overtaken by Williams' George Russell. Shovlin has since explained why Bottas found it so difficult to get past other cars at a circuit with such a long straight that, theoretically, should have helped the Mercedes driver to work his way forward. "Valtteri was finding it hard to get close to other cars on the Intermediate tyres," Shovlin explained to media in Mercedes' post-race debrief. "He was struggling for temperature and that lack of temperature particular early in the race just manifested itself as a lack of grip. In particular for Valtteri when he got close, as close as you'd need to be to make passing move, the front grip was dropping and he was washing out and couldn’t really follow at a distance that would allow you to pass. "Now, the other factor was that in that Intermediate stage, the DRS isn’t enabled and when you can get into the tow, when you can trigger DRS you can actually gain around six tenths of a second just from the combined effect of those two things. "So, that was something that wasn’t available to Valtteri at that stage, which was to Lewis later on, but the key thing was really just the balance of the car, the understeer that he was picking up when he got close and the fact that that meant he couldn’t get the gap down to enough to launch an attack.”
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