VALTTERI BOTTAS INTERVIEW
Five seasons, five versions, and still thinks he can be top dog
Life’s tough when you’re partnered with the greatest driver of your generation. We’ve seen five distinct versions of Valtteri Bottas at Mercedes as he’s tried to fulfil his own ambitions while being a consummate team player – two difficult, competing missions which have been challenging to reconcile. Speaking exclusively to GP Racing, Valtteri doesn’t hold back about his highs and lows… and why he still believes he can be world champion
Since joining Mercedes at short notice to replace Nico Rosberg ahead of the 2017 season, Valtteri Bottas has been a key enabler of four world titles for Lewis Hamilton. But was that how Bottas saw his own career panning out? Probably not.
So what, apart from Hamilton’s once-in-ageneration talent, has held Bottas back? He’s fast, yes, but not always at the right moment. Marginal errors and slips of focus have proved costly, as he’s the first to admit. For all that Finnish reserve, Valtteri is an engaging and brutally honest personality – which he vividly demonstrates as we walk through the five phases of his Mercedes career and pitch the question on everyone’s lips: what does he have to do to stay in the game?
BIG-TIME BOTTAS
When Mercedes called upon Bottas he was five seasons into his F1 career (one as a Williams test driver), with nine podiums to show for it. While neither an established race winner or unproven hotshot, he had plenty going for him: he’d shown well for Williams when that team received a boost from swapping to Mercedes power units at the start of the hybrid era; he was available, since Merc boss Toto Wolff was involved with his management; and perhaps most importantly he was seen as an apolitical team player, a key asset given the strife between Hamilton and Rosberg.
“It was an important stage of my career and a big thing for me,” Bottas says. “I knew I’d be in with a chance to fight for wins and the title. It was harder to adjust than I thought. It felt welcoming and supportive, but there was a different way of working with the engineers, and especially getting used to the car, which was completely different in terms the way it behaved mechanically. I had to change my driving style, but I feel quickly I became a solid part of the team.”
When drivers move teams they often like to import select members of their previous inner circle, particularly race engineers, to reduce their exposure to unfamiliarity. But Bottas didn’t, choosing to plug into the established ‘Team Rosberg’, including race engineer Tony Ross.
“It was deliberate,” explains Bottas, “because I knew there were so many new things for me to learn. I didn’t want people to come with me and be learning the same things as well. I had a really experienced engineer [Ross] who had worked with Nico and been with the team a long time. It was my decision to have the people from Mercedes so they could coach me on it.”
Three victories to Hamilton’s nine might seem underwhelming in the context of Mercedes’ dominance of preceding seasons, but there are mitigating circumstances beyond the business of adjusting to a new car and team. Hamilton also found it tricky to access the full pace of the ‘diva’ W08, and Bottas outqualified and beat him in Russia, the fourth round.
By then, though, Bottas had already been called upon to moderate his pace during the seasonopening Australian GP so as not to pressure his struggling team-mate. In Bahrain he was ordered to move aside for Lewis twice and when Bottas won in Austria, he did so with Vettel tucked under his rear wing and Hamilton fourth, so the issue of team orders went unbroached. If Bottas thought he’d be competing on an equal footing, he faced a sharp recalibration of those expectations.
WINGMAN WOE
Bottas’s second year with Mercedes brought challenges he’s arguably been trying to surmount ever since, and began to ink in the perception that the team sees his role purely as the compliant number two. F1 insiders describe such scenarios as “Coulthard moments”, referring to David Coulthard’s experiences as team-mate to Mika Häkkinen at Mclaren, and his realisation that his status as number two was baked into the system from team principal downwards.
“Okay, it started with some setbacks,” acknowledges Bottas with considerable understatement. “Then it kind of got even worse towards the end of the year. And I remember the end of the year as being really tough to deal with.
“Obviously, week after week when things don’t go right and you get beaten, you have a bit of bad luck as well, and not having a single race win in the whole season… I could see that it was really affecting me, that I wasn’t driving at my best any more. And, you know, confidence goes down, enjoyment of the sport disappears.”
The headline-grabbing calamity of the 2018 season-opener was a strategic one, as Mercedes’ ‘finger trouble’ on the calculator squandered a certain Hamilton victory. Bottas’s miserable race – eighth from 15th on the grid after crashing in Q3 – flew slightly under the radar as a result. But he finished second in Bahrain as Hamilton was hobbled by a grid penalty, and then could have won in China (another day when Bottas had the car dancing to his tune and Hamilton didn’t) had Mercedes not sat on its hands during a Safety Car period and allowed Red Bull to make a race-winning strategic gamble. Coming into the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Bottas was just five points behind Hamilton, but then a puncture dropped him out of the lead with the chequered flag virtually in sight.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see how this season got under Bottas’s skin, and why Mercedes was in such a hurry to impose team orders as the races ticked by. Ferrari seemed to have the faster car and Sebastian Vettel was leading the championship.
Bottas was demonstrating a propensity to lose focus and make small mistakes which had costly outcomes, plus he seemed to be a magnet for bad luck of the pratfall kind: he picked up the puncture in Baku by dint of being first on the scene as race leader, hitting debris left by others colliding on the previous lap.
Afterwards he spoke of seeing the sheer disappointment on the faces of his team, retiring to his hotel, falling to his knees and “crying like a small baby”. Next time out, in Spain, Bottas finished second to Hamilton by a yawning 20-second margin – on a circuit with which every driver is so familiar they could navigate it blindfold. The slide had begun.
By Hungary, Bottas was looking scrappy and it was obvious where Mercedes’ priorities lay. Bottas qualified second to Hamilton but the team brought him in early to cover off a similarly timed stop by Ferrari’s Kimi Räikkönen, preserving track position at the cost of a disadvantageous tyre strategy. In effect both teams had burned their number twos in the bigger game of bluff and counter-bluff. Later on, Bottas clattered into Vettel and Daniel Ricciardo in separate incidents, earning a penalty from the stewards and a patronising description from Merc boss Toto Wolff as “a sensational wingman” for Hamilton.
If that stung, worse was to come in Russia, where Bottas qualified on pole and was assured in a pre-race briefing that if he were to be leading a Mercedes 1-2 he would be allowed to win unless the team was under threat. Come the race, Mercedes blew its pitstop timing once again and Vettel undercut Hamilton for second place, Bottas had to baulk the Ferrari to help his team-mate get a run, and Hamilton blistered a rear tyre retaking the position. Then came the infamous “Valtteri, it’s James [Vowles, chief strategist]” radio message in which Bottas was ordered to move over. Interviewed in the most recent series of Netflix’s Drive to Survive documentary, Bottas admitted he was so upset he considered quitting Formula 1.
“I managed to survive until the end [of the season],” Bottas tells GP Racing. “I still tried to give it all I had every weekend, but once the season was over I was really tired. Physically, yes, but mentally it was tough.
“All the way until early January I was thinking should I call the team and say, ‘OK, that’s me, job done.’ But then it was like a switch I found: basically, fuck it, I’m not gonna give up. I had to see the big picture, that if I quit now I would regret it all my life.”
“TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN...”
Bottas clocked in to the 2019 season sporting a scraggy beard and, as if to emphasise we were witnessing a ‘new’ Valtteri at work, he won the opening round in Australia with a precise piece of margin-gains work at exactly the right moment: the start. Mercedes had qualified 1-2, with Hamilton ahead, but when the lights went out it was Bottas who managed the delicate interplay of clutch finger and throttle foot more deftly, hooking up and surging into the lead as Hamilton experienced momentary wheelspin. This being Albert Park, where processional racing rules, that was that, and Bottas had a message for his detractors over the team radio on the slowingdown lap: “To whom it may concern, fuck you.” Social media gold in the post-bernie F1 era.
“It had been an eye-opening winter,” says Bottas. “I think the big mistake I did in 2018 was to let the setbacks get to me.
“I learned to enjoy more things related to F1. And also, between the races, to do things that I enjoy – hobbies or other things I want to do. So just a small change in the lifestyle and, you know, the beard – the funny thing was that it just appeared because I didn’t bother to shave and I thought, ‘OK, let it stay…’
“F1 is a physical sport but in the end it’s so much about the mind, mental performance, and being in the right head space weekend after weekend. The tricky thing is that we have so many races and they’re all quite demanding – and it’s not just the weekend itself, it’s the build-up, the information from the engineers, and in the normal world the appearances and events. It’s quite… loading… and to be at your personal optimal mental state for each grand prix you need to find that flow. That’s the key – whatever floats your boat, you need to find it.”
Bottas also got by Hamilton at the start in Bahrain, but fell behind him again as Hamilton followed the faster Ferrari of Charles Leclerc through. China was a race which would come to encapsulate Bottas’s season: he qualified on pole from Hamilton but then spun up his rear wheels under secondary acceleration as he crossed the white line. The track marking was held to blame for this, although surely it was in the same place for everyone…
In Azerbaijan Bottas won from pole and had an answer to every question Hamilton posed,
but in Spain Bottas coughed up the lead to his team-mate again despite starting from pole. Then, at Silverstone, another season-encapsulating moment: Bottas made a routine pitstop from the lead, then Antonio Giovinazzi binned his Alfa Romeo messily, enabling Hamilton to pit advantageously behind the Safety Car. Hamilton’s hard tyres weren’t expected to last the rest of the race but he proved otherwise, leaving Bottas feeling doubly stitched up.
Following the weather-induced Mercedes rout at Hockenheim, Bottas qualified second at the Hungaroring, ahead of Hamilton but behind Max
“TO BE AT YOUR PERSONAL OPTIMAL MENTAL STATE FOR EACH GRAND PRIX YOU NEED TO FIND THAT FLOW. THAT’S THE KEY – WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR BOAT, YOU NEED TO FIND IT”
Verstappen’s Red Bull. The Merc drivers narrowly avoided one another on the opening lap through Turns 1 and 2, before Hamilton went around the outside and completed the pass at Turn 3. A swipe from Leclerc as the Ferrari went past at Turn 4 then damaged Bottas’s front wing and consigned him to eighth at the finish. Bottas won in Japan and the USA but the damage was done.
“We started quite well,” he says, “then there were some really small things – having a bad start, losing the position to Lewis and then he got the win, or not 100% nailing the qualifying lap. Mainly it was racing related, things happening on Sunday. And then I struggled to keep the momentum I had from the beginning. I definitely wasn’t performing the best that I could.”
Once again it was a case of marginal losses, perhaps compounded by the aerodynamic philosophy of the Mercedes, which works best while leading in clear air. If you’ve given up that advantage, either to your team-mate or another rival, you’re on the back foot for the entire race. And behind-the-scenes factors may have played a part in Bottas’s occasional absences from the sharp end: late in the year he and his wife announced they were to divorce.
WAVING NOT DROWNING
Besides the small matter of a pandemic, 2020 also delivered another bruising reminder of the excellence of Bottas’s team-mate. The seasonopener, where Bottas triumphed from pole as Hamilton laboured to fourth place, both drivers nursing fragile gearboxes, was an outlier.
Chastened by Ferrari’s improving pace in the final rounds of 2019, Mercedes had dug deep to deliver an improved car and, once its mechanical vulnerabilities were addressed, it was unbeatable until Red Bull came on song with a couple of races to run. Hamilton, too, had found a new level. His race-winning performance in Turkey, on worn intermediate tyres in uncertain conditions, and battling from a disadvantageous qualifying position, was out of the top drawer. On the same track Bottas became embroiled in incidents which damaged his steering and consigned him to a finish outside the top 10.
There were days, too, when he bore the burden of the consequences of wider issues – such as at the British Grand Prix where Bottas was one of several drivers to suffer tyre delaminations. He had to pit, dropping him to 11th, while Hamilton’s tyres let go later, enabling him to win on three wheels. Then the ghost of Baku 2018 rattled its chains at Imola as, while leading, Bottas hit debris left by an earlier shunt. Of the 17 races Mercedes won 13, of which Bottas contributed just two victories.
“There are so many examples of me having bad luck, or something happening, and Lewis ending up on top weekend after weekend,” says Bottas. “And for sure I’m thinking ‘How does he do that?’
“But I feel that performance-wise, it [2020] was the best year I’ve had in Formula 1. Looking at the numbers with the team, race by race, what happened and why I didn’t win, everything was clear. Definitely not the luckiest year, but some good steps in performance and things I’ve learned which I can try to turn to my advantage.”
After the Sakhir GP, where George Russell scored a hit while substituting for the Covidstruck Hamilton, Bottas lobbied successfully for more arm-around-the-shoulder treatment from the team in general and Wolff in particular. The team principal has been noticeably more vocal since then in encouraging Bottas over the radio at critical moments.
ALL OR NOTHING
The 2021 season is a crunch one for Bottas, whose contract is up for renewal as Russell waits in the wings. There was talk pre-season of yet another reboot. But so far there have been few signs that Bottas has got to grips with the performance nuances in which Hamilton has the upper hand, such as tyre management. This is proving critical since the Mercedes W12 is proving to be a handful – unstable at the rear and lacking Merc’s traditional facility (sometimes a weakness) for heating its tyres quickly.
In Bahrain Bottas was critical of being given the same strategy as Hamilton, thereby providing no edge to pass his team-mate. Wolff riposted that this strategy was the only one on the table because Bottas had fluffed the start and dropped behind Leclerc. There was a noticeable froideur in the air. Bottas talked pre-season about being “more selfish” – was this what he meant?
“It’s important to think more about myself,” he says. “And what really is the goal in my career – which is the championship – and think less about others. You can’t change yourself. But if I look at the big picture of my career, it’s not going to last forever. If you’re with a [top] team five, six years, they expect you at least once to win the title, that’s how it goes. That’s how F1 works. And I acknowledge it completely.
“I definitely need to challenge the team when I can, in a good way. I want to make sure all the eggs are in my bowl – I want to make sure I get the better strategy.”
Clearly Bottas will not get this privileged treatment unless he can start beating Hamilton in qualifying, and the performance characteristics of the W12 aren’t working in his favour. At Imola he was fastest in the first two practice sessions but, come qualifying and colder, damper weather, the tyre warm-up issue manifested itself again and he could only manage eighth on the grid. Tyre temperature – or lack thereof – also contributed to Valtteri’s race-ending shunt, enabling Russell to attempt an opportunistic pass in his Williams. On-board images from Russell’s car suggested Bottas had run him off the road, but this perception was skewed by the curvature of the track; the stewards concluded Bottas had given ample room and done nothing wrong.
Nevertheless Russell’s claim (subsequently recanted) that Bottas had deliberately pushed him off because of who he was gained some
“FOR ME THE MAIN GOAL THIS YEAR
IS TO GIVE IT EVERYTHING I HAVE. MUCH MORE THAN I’VE EVER BEEN ABLE TO DO BEFORE”
traction in the fan community, though Wolff described it as “bullshit”. While the incident and its ramifications reflected more negatively on Russell, Bottas urgently needs to up his game and get on top of the truculent W12 – especially since Hamilton is making it work relatively well.
“For me the main goal this year is to give it everything I have,” says Bottas. “Much more than I’ve ever been able to do before. Whether it’s what I do in the race week, how much I’m demanding from the engineers, my coach, my family.
“I want to make sure that once we’re done in Abu Dhabi I look back and can say I gave it all I had left in the tank.”