Bottas plays down deficit, bizarre pit lane spin

Valtteri Bottas moved to play down his relative lack of performance, and a peculiar pit lane spin, during second practice for the Styrian Grand Prix.

Bottas finished the second one-hour session only 12th on the leaderboard, eight-tenths of a second down on Red Bull driver Max Verstappen.

Despite the low-key showing the Finn was relaxed about the state of play.

“Practice one felt a bit better and practice two I just had one run with lower fuel level that was a bit messy, so the lap time on the board is nothing amazing,” he said.

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“But the topic for today was to focus on long runs and try to focus on long run performance. I think we prepared ourselves pretty well today and hopefully that will pay off on Sunday.”

Of greater intrigue during the session was a bizarre spin in the pit lane.

Bottas, leaving his pit box, lit up the rear tyres and spun into the slow lane, in front of the McLaren mechanics.

Bottas has been summoned to the stewards in order to explain the incident.

“We tried something different coming out of the box and there were some variables compared to what I normally do and that’s why I spun,” he said.