A crash before the first race of the season has started is not what Bottas would have wanted at this time of his career with Merc. This will shatter his confidence, unless he redeems himself and produces a podium finish. It has been done before from this low a position on the starting grid, so it's not an impossible task. He also needs to pass Ricciardo. If he doesn't manage that at least, he can say goodbye to his 2019 Merc seat.

Wonder if it will be easier to follow another car closely this season with the aero changes. Also wonder if Hamilton will just bugger off into the distance tomorrow and leave the ferarris to scrap with the red bulls.
Daniel riccardio will be in the other silver arrow next season if bottas doesnt pull the rabbit out of the hat. Made a right balls up of qualifying

The most negative indication for the season was the grid place penalty applied to Ricciardo. If his actions had caused an incident of any sort, then fine, the time fits the crime. But as a punitive warning to everyone it's counter productive for F1 interest to keep affecting races this way, especially the season opening.

Can someone explain to me - there are measures in place to keep qualifying representative of race set-up, they must start on qually tires, etc., yet a single lap boost mode is allowed to gain an advantage when it would be detrimental to start the race with it.

I'd like to see the arrangement they have in F1 Stock cars, where the grid positions are decided by prior performance and results, with the field assembled in reverse order and the fastest at the back. Plenty of overtaking, you must beat everyone to win and nobody disappears off to the horizon in clear air.   

Waste of time race!
Processional and the only overtake of any meaning was a 'virtual' one..
To quote Vettel - Honestly guys what are we doing here?
F1 has lost the plot when you can jump two places like that..

So the team could have brought Hammi in and negated the effect? Don't think so..
I'd fallen asleep and had to rewind to see the position swap.
It was that boring

"A pit stop made under the virtual safety car takes 10 seconds less than one made when the cars are at full speed and the time gain of stopping while Hamilton was restricted on track allowed Vettel to rejoin the race just ahead of the Mercedes." ...BBC

It's happened before but not for the lead of the race and probably not jumping two places..

Next time the leader, if possible, could pull a bigger lead to break even this possibility...
Or the virtual safety car rules need revising.

Boring Albert park!

Reading this.

"Did I do something wrong?'

Hamilton asked his team whether he had done anything wrong, and they told him they were looking into what happened.

Afterwards team boss Toto Wolff said Mercedes' computer systems had calculated wrongly the time gap Hamilton needed to ensure he had enough of an advantage to keep the lead under a VSC.

Wolff said: "We thought we had enough margin to beat Sebastian but then we saw the TV pictures and it wasn't enough. I think it must have been a software problem somewhere in our system."

He said the only thing Hamilton could have done had they had different data would have been to build a bigger gap in the six laps between his pit stop and the VSC - which they would have asked him to do despite the risk it would have created of wearing the tyres too much for the end of the race."

So even with the right calculation it is hard to see how they could really have done something differently.
Ferrari hoped for a safety car and Haas luckily obliged.

What he said was taken massively out of context, as usual.

He's simply ultra-competitive.  Show me a highly successful sportsperson who isn't ultra-competitive and is happy not winning.  Winning in F1 is down to small percentages, get something small wrong even with a superior car on the day - can easily result in throwing away a race win.

It's being rumoured that Bottas may go to Ferrari next year. He doesn't deserve any F1 seat, let alone one at another top team. I can't wait for the day he's out of F1 altogether.

He’s waiting for them to say “no”, so he can reply with, “well what have YOU done wrong then?”

I was a little disappointed with Raikonnen’s race - I was hoping he’d be trying to get one up on his team mate and start the season as he meant to go on, but I guess the position they were in, the team were always going to pit one to make Hamilton follow, then keep the other out - I guess Ferrari have team orders already...