Valtteri Bottas admitted about his unnatural driving style last season, due to overthinking. He began to worry about his performance at the start of the season when things with Mercedes began to deviate from the expected performance curve.
While Bottas was struggling to catch up-to the pace, his partner, Lewis Hamilton, generated lead in the championship with four wins in five races of Formula 1.
He started with pole position in Brazil and finished second, then won the season finale race in Abu Dhabi. But accepted that low performances had been mentally challenging.
“After struggling quite a lot for a couple of races, it wasn’t easy mentally because I was quite confused in the beginning – like ‘what’s going on?’,” Bottas told Motorsport.com.
“For sure you also start to doubt what you’re doing. Then also when you need to change some things with your driving style and need to adapt to many different things suddenly you realise it’s not that simple.
“Then you easily overthink things and then it becomes less natural driving. But it’s going to a much better direction. If there’s going to be similar struggles [in 2018] I’m prepared for that.
“And I’ve learnt massively from those difficult races so I think I’m a lot better driver as well than for example in Spa or Malaysia or Japan.”
While sharing about his shortfalls and performance gap relative to Hamilton, he iterated that it was mainly due to experience deficit.
“What he’s been doing better than me, I think it comes mainly from experience,” said Bottas.
“I think ultimately mechanically the car hasn’t really changed much from the last few years, in terms of how it behaves, and it was very different how the Williams car behaved.
“So there’s been many things for me to learn, and I’ve been kind of catching up on things all the time.”
Bottas is optimistic about his performance in the coming season, as he has got used to Mercedes. He is hopeful to be “a much more complete, much quicker driver on average” in 2018
Bottas praised Hamilton’s work ethics.
“I always knew that he’s really talented for sure, and he’s quick in any circumstances always – he just goes in the car and he’s very quick,” said Bottas.
“But that also comes from hard work, he works hard with the team.”
