Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas admits that a fourth consecutive title defeat at the hands of teammate Lewis Hamilton is “tough to accept.”
Bottas has finished runner-up in the championship in the past two seasons, after coming P3 and P5 in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Aside from promising season starts in 2019 and 2020, the Finn has yet to mount a serious F1 title challenge against Hamilton.
The 31-year-old has been repeatedly accused of too vastly underperforming relative to his teammate, who has won the title in each of the years during which he has paired with Bottas. Alongside his former teammate Nico Rosberg, Hamilton was consistently challenged, and the Brit lost his title fight to the German in 2016.
Bottas confesses that his successive losses to Hamilton have been difficult to stomach, but adds that there are takeaways from his unsuccessful 2020 bid. “It’s these kind of moments when you feel that you don’t perform 100% for many different races, for different reasons – for sure there’s a lot to learn about,” he said to media including Motorsport Network, F1, Racefands.net, BBC, AMuS and more.
“It’s no secret that battling with Lewis years and years, it takes out of me when I try and get 100% out of me every single weekend and keep pushing. Sometimes I get close, sometimes I manage to beat him, but having a defeat a fourth year in a row in terms of the championship title is tough to accept.
“So for sure it has an effect and when you know the title is lost, it’s not quite the same even though you should always given 100%, which is what I try. But everyone knows how mentally sensitive this sport is.
“So I think from this year again there’s lots to learn that hopefully can use for the future,” Bottas added at the end of the 2020 season, when he was 124 points adrift of Hamilton. In 2019 – albeit with less misfortune – the Finn was only 87 points behind his Mercedes teammate.
“I think every driver has their own ways to reset and get back up when you have a bad moment,” said Bottas, when asked about dealing with negative comments. “Since Imola, it’s been a run of really bad luck. It’s true that I feel that I’ve not really been performing at my best but of course I still try to extract everything as I can.
“There’s many factors in this sport and sometimes it’s luck, sometimes it’s what do you do yourself in the car and outside the car. All that I can say that I can do much better than if you look at the last four races on average, I feel that I need to be better,” summed up Bottas.
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