The lessons "peak" Bottas learned at Mercedes that will elongate his F1 career

According to the World Happiness Report, compiled under the auspices of the United Nations, Finland is the happiest country in the world. The land of reindeer and lakes has topped the rankings since 2018. And although Valtteri Bottas hasn’t lived in his homeland for quite some time, he’s perfectly suited to the role of its ambassador. Because he is one happy Finn.

A trip to the North is one of his wintertime traditions. A couple of years ago Bottas finished building a small house not far off the Arctic Circle, in one of those places where the sun remains below the horizon throughout December.

“It’s a place called Kilpisjarvi,” he tells GP Racing. “It’s [a village] at the border of Finland, Sweden and Norway. So basically, as north as you can escape. Maybe you need to check, but I believe it’s fewer than 200 people.”

He isn’t wrong, as far as we can tell. In 2000, which appears to be the last time someone visited with a clipboard, the population of Kilpisjarvi was recorded as being 114. These days, Bottas’s abode there is one of his favourite places for rest.

“It’s almost like a treehouse type of thing,” he says, calling to mind TV’s Grand Designs. “There’s like two cabins connected. One is just one bedroom upstairs. So that means no [place for] guests! And downstairs, a kitchen and a living room. And the other building is just purely a sauna and a relaxation area on top. And I have a big garage for toys, ski-doos and stuff like that.”

Our appointment with Bottas is in somewhere similar but not quite so geographically remote – Sweden’s Pite Havsbad, 600km south of Kilpisjarvi. The Race of Champions is here for the second time in a row – a sporting meet for drivers from various motorsport categories, including the likes of F1 veterans Mika Hakkinen, David Coulthard and Sebastian Vettel.

For Bottas, racing on an ice track on the frozen Baltic Sea, with a sauna twenty steps away from the service park, is a great way of transitioning from holidaying to working. For GP Racing it’s an ideal venue to catch him in conditions resembling his natural habitat.

Bottas came close to quitting F1 entirely during stressful periods at Mercedes - but has rediscovered his love for racing

Photo by: Alfa Romeo

“When I’m in Finland, I’m in the sauna every day,” says Bottas. “It’s almost like a spiritual thing in a way because normally, you don’t talk that much in the sauna. You’re just trying to reset your thoughts.”

Is this the secret ingredient of Finnish happiness?

“The pace of the life of a Finn is quite slow. I mean, we’re always on time, but nothing needs to happen like this,” Valtteri snaps his fingers to illustrate the point. “We’re really fortunate to have very pure air, pure water. We have lots of space. Obviously, yes, in the city you have a lot of people. But as soon as you get out, you have beautiful forests, lakes, and space. And silence.

“I think, with all this combined, you start to appreciate small things in life. The feeling you get when you go to the sauna, for example. It’s like a big treat. You enjoy it. Yeah, simple things make us happy.”

 Learning to love F1 again

The time Finland has spent at the top of the happiness ranking leaderboard has more or less overlapped with the most successful period of Bottas’s career. Brought in to replace the retired Nico Rosberg at Mercedes, Bottas won 10 races, became world vice-champion twice and, as he puts it, even lost count of his podiums.

Yet the five years within the German car giant’s team were also full of stress. Patchy job security due to serial one-year contracts, consistent comparisons with a driver who is now the most successful ever in the history of F1, along with unpleasant episodes like Sochi 2018, when Bottas had to give up a win – all that almost made him retire from F1. So, in terms of enjoying life, it’s only recently that he’s caught up to his table-topping fellow countrymen.

And, of course, the Alfa Romeo move isn’t the only source of that. As Bottas disrobes for some ‘authentic’ sauna shots, the stark contrast between his bronzed arms and shins and the expanse of pale flesh elsewhere clearly displays the fact that he is an avid cyclist (“Tan lines should be cultivated and kept razor sharp” is the seventh dictum of the Velominati’s famous Rules).

The bicycle is now a huge part of Bottas’s life. Not only is it a way of spending time with his girlfriend, professional cyclist Tiffany Cromwell – though that’s obviously a big factor – it’s also something which has helped him reach his peak physical form without subjecting himself to an excruciating training regime. And that’s very important to Bottas, who admits that in the early years of his career – especially when his Williams team-mate was the diminutive Felipe Massa – he’d trained himself “to pain, physically and mentally” while trying to shed weight.

“I also had a much more strict diet because, naturally, I’m not light,” says Bottas. “You know, I’m really strongly built, so I almost had to starve myself. And then, yeah, the training programme...”

Bottas pushed himself hard during his early F1 career to limit his weight disadvantage relative to team-mate Massa

Photo by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Images

“Actually, if I look at just hours, I’m probably training more now than I’d done in those years, but it was much more strict and specific at that time. I always, for every week, had a certain plan on paper done with the coach, and I would just execute that plan every day.”

Naturally, Bottas was one of those drivers benefitting from when F1 changed its rules and finally stopped setting a minimum weight limit that was driver and car combined rather than just the car. That change meant he no longer had to lose weight at all costs. But it wasn’t just that which changed his training routine – first and foremost, it was experience.

“I think I’ve learned a lot about myself over the years,” he says. “And one thing I’ve learned is that it’s good to listen to your body and sometimes just do things that you want to do, instead of something planned and specific. Today, if I need to go for a gym session, but I feel like I actually want to ride my bike to the mountain, then I’ll choose that and move the gym session to another day.

"I definitely overtrained myself [in the past]. But you learn. You know your limits better as well" Valtteri Bottas

“In the long term, it’s really, really important, especially if you want to have a long career. It’s very easy to burn the candle from both ends and go to a bad place through that. That’s why it’s important to know yourself and your body. Unfortunately, quite often with athletes, that comes from learning from your own mistakes.

“I definitely overtrained myself [in the past]. But you learn. You know your limits better as well. Now I know exactly what my body says. Okay, if you need to have a rest day, or three days of rest, that’s what you’ve got to do.”

 The cheek of it

“There’s probably three things I enjoy about it,” Bottas says of cycling. “One, yeah, the physical feeling. Another one is you see so much, especially with a gravel bike.

“And then the last thing is, I feel it’s pretty good for my head. Because on the bike... I don’t know, I always find that I mostly think about positive things. It’s somehow natural. Maybe the endorphins or whatever you produce when you do sports... I don’t know!”

It seems logical that riding a bike with your girlfriend is a lot more fun than lifting weights in a room with sweaty dudes. And while he’s not shy to admit he’s still not at the level of Tiffany, Bottas’s numbers
are pretty impressive.

Bottas has found a new release in cycling rather than training just to hit targets

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“Last year I did 7777.7 kilometres,” he smiles. “After the F1 season was done, I saw that I’d done like five-thousand-something. And I said to myself, ‘OK, by the end of this year, I want to be at 7777’ – and I made it on New Year’s Eve. I finished the last kilometres with [former F1 driver] Brendon Hartley in New Zealand on the mountain bike. And then, once I completed the target, we had a shot of tequila!”

It was during one of these trips with Tiffany that Bottas became the source of a new meme. Having stayed in the US after the Miami Grand Prix, and in the company of renowned sports photographer Paul Ripke, they made a stop in Aspen, Colorado. A picture of Bottas bathing in one of the mountain streams – with his posterior on full display – quickly became the most-liked post on his Instagram.

“I posted it in the evening in Aspen,” he laughs, “and then I didn’t look at it until the next morning. But when I checked it... it had quite a lot of likes and interactions. Actually, it was Paul who came up with the idea that we should do something good with this because it was booming. So almost immediately, we decided to do prints, sell them, and give the money to charity.”

Over 5000 people in 24 hours paid €10.77 each for a print.

“I had 50,000 euros in like this,” Bottas snaps his fingers again. “And because the picture was of my butt, [the money went to a charity] where they support people who have stomach cancer, you know, problems in the stomach and, well, the exhaust pipe.

“So yeah, glad I could do some good for charity with my butt!”

The meme shows no sign of dying down. No rain-interrupted track session goes by without someone superimposing a bare-assed Bottas onto a screen grab of wet asphalt from the official broadcast, then sharing it on social media.

He’s happy to play along. One of the photo prints he presented personally to Lewis Hamilton in the Monaco Grand Prix paddock. He’ll happily pose for photos in front of t-shirts with that very same image captioned ‘Finest Ass in Finland’. And he’s made his rear available for a photoshoot to go into an F1 magazine – even though that required emerging from a cold sauna into -8°C wearing just a beanie.

F1 has seen a new side to Bottas since his Alfa Romeo move

Photo by: Jerry Andre

Alfa bravo

Last year was also a qualified success in terms of on-track results. It was the first time since his rookie F1 season in 2013 that he didn’t score a podium, but that was to be expected after moving from a team which had won every constructors’ title since 2014 to one which had finished 2021 ninth in the standings.

The 2022 constructors’ roster, taken alongside the drivers’ championship table, suggests Bottas achieved what he wanted in his first season with his new team.

“I think it’s a good reflection,” he agrees. “I’m happy we hit the targets as a team, even though it was a bit too close at the end for seventh place. But we made it to top six and me to the top 10, which I thought would be a good starting point for this project.”

It’s fair to say Alfa could have been much lower on the table without Bottas. His 49 points were almost 90% of the team’s tally. Bottas delivered when it mattered the most, at the start of the season when Alfa Romeo was at its most competitive. And then he picked up crucial points in Mexico and Brazil which allowed the team to just hold off Aston Martin.

"I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, on track and outside of the track" Valtteri Bottas

It may be that his team-mate Zhou Guanyu had the greater share of the bad luck but, either way, simple maths is enough to conclude that, had it fielded a pair of rookies, the Hinwil team could have ended up eighth or even ninth rather than sixth. Bottas was hired to make the most of the car and show its true potential. And that is exactly what he did.

“Of course, it makes me proud,” he says. “But it’s also understandable that as a rookie, the first few races are the most difficult ones, and that’s when the car was kind of the most competitive the whole year. Yeah, it just shows that experience can help a lot.”

He also admits he needed a break from the spotlight – from having his performance compared directly with Hamilton’s every weekend.

“It’s definitely easier,” he says. “There’s probably less judgment, and I can just really focus on the work. I think I really needed that kind of change, also [at this stage] in my career. So I only see positive things about that.

“I’m sure it does reflect on performance. Some of the races I drove last year I definitely felt I was at my peak. For sure, it helps when you’re in a good headspace, and also the stress level is lower, which gives you more energy. And then that reflects for the whole team as well. Like, if I would be really tense, that could transfer to the people I work with.”

Bottas may not be fighting at the sharp end of the grid with Alfa Romeo, but is feeling more relaxed than ever and deriving greater joy from his racing as a result

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

The tension is indeed probably less, when finishing anywhere but first isn’t automatically cause for criticism, when your team-mate isn’t a multiple-time world champion, and when most of the memes about you concern your posterior rather than the now-infamous “Valtteri, it’s James.”

At Alfa nobody asks him to be anyone else, too. When he was at Mercedes Bottas was often told – by media members and even the aforementioned Rosberg – that he must become less of a ‘nice guy’, ‘get under Lewis’s skin’ and start indulging in some ‘mind games’.

“I’ve had all kinds of questions in press conferences, but that one was, yeah, [put to me] many times,” he laughs. “People kind of expected that’s what I need to do.

“But you can’t change your personality. You know, I like to do things my way. And also, you know, I knew that if I became, let’s say, an asshole, then... Yeah, the team spirit gets more tricky, the success of the team might struggle with that. And also, I could probably lose my job! Because I never had a contract for next year. So if become an asshole and I don’t win, that’s just game over.”

Happiness is the truth

Now he doesn’t have to create and publicise a new version of himself every year, to be ‘Bottas 2.0’, ‘3.0’, or any other evolution. He is just Valtteri Bottas, one of the top 10 drivers in the world’s most prestigious racing series. He’s one of the main assets of his team, has established a leadership role, knows what he’s capable of on the racetrack – and mostly does what he likes off it as well. He is as fit as ever and comfortable in his own skin.

“I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my life,” he confirms, “on track and outside of the track, too.”

There’s only one downside, really. He’s no longer fighting for poles, wins and podiums weekend-to-weekend – and he readily admits that the emotions of simply getting a quality result with Alfa Romeo can’t replace the feeling of seeing his name in first place in the classification.

“As a racer, for sure, when you do an amazing quali lap,” says Bottas, “and then you see somebody still more than one second faster... yeah.

Bottas with fellow Finn Hakkinen at this year's Race of Champions

Photo by: Jerry Andre

“But I’m completely fine with that. I had enough time to make sure that mentally I reset the goals. And then, when these are the goals, you focus on those. I know the name of the game; it’s how it goes in this sport. If you want to win, you need to be in the top two teams. The satisfaction comes from different things now. You know, seeing progress and hitting targets, and just keep working that way.”

For a guy who admitted his main motivation to get out of bed was to be world champion, it must be difficult to let it go. But Bottas can’t tell us how difficult – because he doesn’t feel he’s let anything go yet.

"F1 is a funny sport, you just never know what happens. And I still feel like I have many years in me" Valtteri Bottas

“No, it’s still there,” he says. “In my mind, I haven’t given up on winning. I know that in the future, if things go well, it is possible. So that’s always there, that same motivation.

“Because F1 is a funny sport, you just never know what happens. And I still feel like I have many years in me. Still, I know it’s very challenging for us as a team to win a race. But you also know that something can happen. It can be a crazy race and stuff. So, never say never.”

Call him an optimist or even naive. Could that lingering motivation come in handy down the line? In 2026, when his current team becomes the works outfit for a German automotive giant, he’ll only be 36. Still in peak physical form, hopefully in the right frame of mind and quite possibly still the team’s lead driver. And if that German manufacturer’s project hits the sweet spot right away we know at least one driver who’d be happy for that to happen.

After feeling refreshed at Alfa Romeo, could a lead role in Audi's F1 entry be next?

Photo by: Jerry Andre