Valtteri Bottas says he has identified the areas where he has to work more to catch Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton in 2020 F1 title fight.
With a lost 2019 title fight behind him, Bottas is looking forward to the 2020 season as the one where he hopes to achieve his first F1 world championship. Albeit, the Finn has already been part of three championships in his time at Mercedes.
And, discussing what he’ll need to do in order to topple the reigning champion Hamilton, Bottas highlighted consistency as his main area where he needs growth. He feels lack of consistency was a major issue for him in 2019.
He dominated several races yet struggled somewhat in the rest of the season. He has identified the areas now and is working with the engineers to be much better in 2020. “For sure I need to be better than last year,” said Bottas to media including FormulaRapida.net.
“Last year, winning some races and I could take some poles but overall, throughout the season, Hamilton was better, so I need to be better myself this year in multiple areas, but especially consistency. On my good day, when I get 100 percent out of myself, I feel I can do it, I feel I can beat anyone.
“But to be there throughout the race weekend, that’s the tricky thing, and there are so many things that affect that mindset. Preparation, your personal life, your fitness, your health. All these things need to come together, and just what I was saying about trying to add more tools in my driving style box as I call it, that can be very useful when things get tricky and challenging.
“There has been some kind of a trend in terms of where usually the losses have been, me against Lewis, and I’ve been able to find those with the engineers and why it happens and how to fix it, and fixing it is a process, and so far I’ve made good progress with that.
“I’m really looking forward to the season, because it doesn’t matter what I say here, because you don’t get much points from talking. That’s why I’m eager to get on-track and get racing and see how things go.”
“I don’t know about the numbers or versions, I don’t really care about that,” said Bottas, referring to the Bottas 2.0 name he was given last season when he came back from winter reinvigorated and the prospective Bottas 3.0 for 2020.
“The only thing I care about is trying to be better this year and more improved myself than last year. I managed to make a good jump in my performance from 2018 to 19, and that’s what I’ve been aiming to do again. Still working on progress.
“I had a good break, good disconnect which I learned the year before that it’s important to step back, have more time to process previous years and things you need to improve. At the same time, we’ve been working a lot with engineers and attacking my weaknesses, trying to make them better, and it’s just continuing work with that.
“As I said earlier, it was nice to see in the car that I’ve been able to adapt some different things in my driving compared to previous years. It’s good. It was a pretty nice winter. I was mainly in Australia, then I did the rally in Lapland, it was good, good contrast of different things.”
Additionally, Bottas also noted that he needs to perform better when the car is not at peak quality. This is something which Hamilton has shown to be very good at in latter part of his F1 career, making him a tough opponent to beat.
“Sometimes you need to adapt more with your driving style when conditions or the car is difficult to drive,” said Bottas. “Then sometimes it becomes more about which kind of things you’re actually focusing on throughout the weekend and throughout the qualifying session.
“Usually the best thing is to focus on your own performance and try to block out any other thoughts and really focus on yourself and on doing many, many things that I believe I can do better, and also try to minimise a few mistakes that I did in some of the Q3 sessions last year that was then costing points in the race. But all those things, it is always a long list that you can do better from the previous years.”
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The story was edited by Darshan Chokhani
