Italian GP: Valtteri Bottas rues missed chance of fighting Mercedes

The Williams driver qualified third, but slipped outside the top 10 on the first lap of Sunday's race at Monza, after suffering excessive wheelspin off the grid and struggling for grip.

The Finn recovered to fourth behind team-mate Felipe Massa, but said his pace when not running in traffic suggested his FW36 was a match for the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, which finished one-two for the seventh time in 13 races in 2014.

"They seemed to be really strong. I don't know how much they were on the limit with engine modes," Bottas said, when asked by AUTOSPORT if he felt he could have challenged the Mercedes had he enjoyed a clean race.

"But even though in the first 20 laps I was fighting, when I got to the clean air I could keep a more or less similar pace to them, so that will be a question mark forever I think.

"It's a pity because I came into the race with the mentality that this is probably the best chance of the season to fight for the win, so fourth position is not really that satisfying.

"But we need to look at the positives, because in the end we got good points for the team and now we are ahead of Ferrari [in the constructors' championship], which compared to last year is a really good result."

Bottas suggested Williams might have been more competitive at Monza had Pirelli chosen to bring softer tyre compounds to Italy, but the team's performance chief, Rob Smedley, does not think it would have made a difference to his squad's eventual three-four result.

When asked by AUTOSPORT if softer tyres would have helped, Smedley replied: "I don't think it would've changed the end result.

"I think it was a fairly easy one-stop race, so they definitely could have brought a softer compound tyre here and pushed it to a two-stopper, but that's their choice.

"They brought the medium tyre here and we still saw some good racing."