Bottas: New upgrades have improved cornering performance

Valtteri Bottas has hailed Mercedes' upgrades that it has introduced at the Spanish Grand Prix.

The Finn appeared to have great pace on the opening day of the weekend, topping both practice sessions, ending the second one marginally ahead of teammate Lewis Hamilton.

The Silver Arrows were three-tenths ahead of Ferrari, and look to hold the advantage when it comes to the long-run pace.

"It’s always an interesting day when you’re bringing new parts to the car to get a feel for it and see if they bring the performance they should," Bottas said after Friday's running. 

"The car felt really good today, completely different to how it was in winter testing, and it seems like our cornering performance has improved.

“The balance around the lap is also better, so it looks like we’ve taken the right direction since the winter.

"Today was good, but it’s only Friday and Ferrari are very close. It feels like we’ve made a good step forward, but we need to wait and see what tomorrow holds.”

Bottas' FP1 session came to an early end after Mercedes uncovered a leak towards the end of the 90 minutes.

However, Mercedes' Andrew Shovelin said that there was no damage sustained to the engine and is confident it will be reliable for the future. 

"We had an oil leak on Valtteri’s car in the first session which stopped us before he could do the long run at the end of the session," he said.

"Fortunately, it doesn’t look to have caused any damage and we were able to get back out at the start of the second session. We also had quite a few new bits on the car here, so we’ll also be checking the data from those this evening to confirm it’s all functioning as expected.”