Looking back on his time with Mercedes, Valtteri Bottas believes that he can be unbeatable on his best days on the field.
The Finnish racing driver has spent five seasons with the Mercedes teams and has led it to five Constructors’ Championships. However, he could never manage to create a solid ground for battling the drivers’ championship.
Bottas only won 10 races in the past five years and felt that he needed to be at his best all the time which he could not manage to do as much as he wanted to.
The Finn believes that luck played a crucial role in the final outcome of his title battles. “I honestly feel like on my best days, whether it’s a race or qualifying, I’m unbeatable. But unfortunately, I don’t always have the best days,” he told The Race.
“I can’t say that I exceeded any of my expectations. I have pretty high expectations for myself, personally. Maybe a bit too high.”
He said that the beginning of this season was pretty much a disaster with all the crashes and what felt to him like endless engine penalties. “It just wasn’t quite meant to be so far,” he said.
But I have to say in the five years, there’ve been moments that I don’t know if I should cry or laugh about my luck because I don’t really feel like I’ve been the luckiest driver with many things,” he further explained.
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Valtteri Bottas admitted it was not simple alongside Hamilton
Bottas said that his performances did not exceed his expectations and at the same time were cloaked with Hamilton’s sheer pace and consistency.
Lewis Hamilton won four out of five drivers’ championships riding alongside his Finnish teammate. Bottas said, “I can’t say I exceeded anything. Where I feel like I failed, obviously I didn’t manage to win the Drivers’ Championship. But it wasn’t simple alongside Lewis. He always got the upper hand.”
“I feel like the ones who know about the sport and who follow the sport, they definitely acknowledge that I can be pretty fast on my day. The baseline level as a driver like Lewis is so high that it is quite tricky to outperform him all the time.”
“It’s a very mental sport and I think a strength of Lewis is the consistency and rarely having any off weekends in terms of performance. If it varies it’s only marginal,” he concluded.
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