The Finn could only set a time good enough for eighth as he ended up over two seconds off the pace of🐼 polesitt꧑er Max Verstappen and Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton in a dramatic, wet qualifying at Spa. 

Bottas, who struggled with similar tyre🃏 warm up issues on the intermediate compounꦐd at Imola, explained that a combination of a slow out-lap and low downforce set-up played a role in his poor Q3 display. 

“Definitel🍬y the set-up wasn’t really foꦅr the wet,” Bottas conceded. 

“I think, as a team, we were quite on a low wing level, so I hope that tomorrow at some point it’s going to be dry and we’ll get some overtaki🅰ng done. 

“But I was sure that the car was still capable of getting into t🧜he top three. Sure Lewis is in the top three, but the issue for me in Q3 was that on the slow lap, to cool the tyres, I had to slow down too much to let other cars through, and I just lost front tyre temperature. 

“And I immediately started locking up in the last lap and 🌊that’s whyಌ the lap time wasn’t that great.

“I think strategically we were not bad,” he added. “I think we were🅺 in a good place. But for me, just having to back off too much in the slow lap, that cost me time and that was the main issue.”

To make matters worse for Bottas, he will drop five places on the grid for♐ causing the Turn 1 carnage at the Hungarian GP last time o🍸ut. 

Asked if it will just be a race to survive in, he replied: “If the conditions are like this, yes, because just🎀 making it to the end will pro﷽bably get you quite far. 

“There will be opportunities. I’m not in the best place for the start but you never knowﷺ. Toda✱y showed anything can happen, and probably, tomorrow will.”