BARCELONA, Spain -- Valtteri Bottas is convinced Mercedes has plenty more to come in the second week of pre-season testing.
Mercedes encountered a blip on Thursday, with an electrical fault preventing Lewis Hamilton from leaving the garage for most of the morning. Bottas, who had been scheduled to run in the afternoon anyway, took over when the issue was rectified half an hour before lunch, compiling 68 laps.
The Finn has had a fruitful first week for Mercedes, accumulating more laps (324) and recording the quickest lap (1:19.705 on Wednesday) with the W08.
Reflecting on what the second week of testing holds, he said: "We are definitely hoping that we can make good steps forward from this week to next week. We can be better. Obviously from the running this week, it is tricky to make detailed analysis where we are compared to other teams. We don't know what the other teams are bringing next week, or to Melbourne.
"But definitely we are aiming to improve day by day and now we have the weekend to work on all the things that we have tried out this week. For me also, a weekend to take everything in, what I learned this week, which was a massive amount, so we'll try to analyse all of that and also be myself better next week."
Despite having the quickest lap time after four days of pre-season testing Bottas is paying little attention to headline times -- hinting that he feels there is even more to come from 2017's cars,
"It does not have any special meaning because it's only testing and there's no reward for that. We weren't particularly focusing on lap times this week, the main priority was, for us, to get the mileage, find any issues with the car if there was anything to come from that side, because we'd rather have them here than in the races.
"For me it was important to get the mileages, so I was pretty happy we could manage plenty of running and, at the same time, go through the test program of the team.
"I think that during the two days of running I did - in four half days - I definitively did more laps than I've ever done and that's very nice and very useful in this new era of Formula One, with the new type of cars and, for me, with a new team. For me any track time is beneficial and I learned a lot from this running, and I'll be working together with the team on all the details. So it was a very good test, overall, the best ever for me."