Abu Dhabi circuit bump caused Bottas F1 suspension failure

The Finn climbed to ninth in the early stages of the race having overtaken Williams team-mate Felipe Massa, before dropping back to 11th and then retiring on lap seven.

Chief technical officer Pat Symonds suspects the problem was similar to the ones Williams suffered during last year's United States Grand Prix weekend.

This was when both Bottas and Massa suffered failures of the rear inertia damper after hitting a bump at Turn 11 at Austin, which led to changes being made to avoid a repeat of the problem.

"It was a particular bump which looks like it triggered it," said Symonds when asked by Autosport what the cause was.

"Abu Dhabi is quite bumpy, but it should be able to handle it quite easily.

"It's probably similar to what happened in America in 2015, but we won't know until we strip everything.

"We put a lot of containment in place after that incident [at Austin] to try and stop that sort of thing happening again and it does look quite similar."

Symonds added that he did not believe it was a driver-induced failure, because Bottas had not been off track and the high load that caused the impact wasn't from hitting a kerb too hard.

Bottas confirmed he had no warning of the failure or explanation for the cause.

"No, nothing unusual, no big kerbing or anything," Bottas told Autosport when asked if there was an obvious cause or unusual impact before the failure.

"From my feeling, it was a couple of laps after I got past Felipe.

"Under braking into Turn 9, the rear just started to move a lot and it got worse and worse."