Mercedes Formula 1 driver Valtteri Bottas says he paid the price for making a mistake as he crashed during🌄 opening practice for the Singapore Grand Prix.

Bottas lost the back-end of his Mercedes W10 coming out of Turn 19 an♛d slammed straight into the barriers on the exit of the corner, causing heavy damage.

It left Mercedes 🀅with a big repair job to get Bottas’ crash ahead of second practice, but the team was able to s🍌end the Finn back out at the start of FP2.

“It was a tricky one, had a b🐼it of an off moment in FP1 which ended my running a bit early, but I really was f♛eeling OK until then,” Bottas said.

“I just lost the back-end in one of the corners, and obviously here wit♊h no run-offs, you pay the price. It can happen I guess.”

Bottas ended up with the fourth-fastest time but was 1.121s off the pace of session-leade🔜r and teammate Lewis Hamilton, leading Bottas to suspect his car was not running at 100 percent following his crash.

“P2, not sure really what was going on, was lacking pace every single run,ꦛ every tyre compound, so I’m not quite sure if everything was right in the car,” he explained.

“We♏ need to have a look. It 🧸felt like I couldn’t go any quicker, but I was one second off the pace. A bit tricky.

“T🧔he only thing I could really feel was quite a bit of friction in the steering system, struggled to feel the car properly.

“We’ll look at everything for sure, but I doubt every♑thing was 100 percent. 🌺Obviously need to have a look at what I can do better as well.”

“For sure you need to push always, and the biggest push in Q3, obviously try and minimise the damag♋e in practice.

“I think it’s going to be close between the three teams, but Lewis was definitely on fo༺rm today.”