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After five seasons with the Mercedes team, alongside Lewis Hamilton,
Valtteri Bottas is leaving for the crimson lands of Alfa Romeo at the end of the year.
Lewis Hamilton called him his ‘best ever team mate’ and Mercedes said he would
have well deserved to continue racing with them and have repeated lauded his work for the team.
In many ways he was the ideal candidate for that partic ular seat. But now, George Russell is
finally being promoted to the works Mercedes team - a move we were never entirely sure would happen,
so enamoured Mercedes were with Bottas. So let’s look back at Bottas’s time with
the team and cast some broad strokes over his performance with the best team on the grid.
We can compare Valtteri’s results directly against Lewis during the 91
races between Bottas’s debut with the team in Australia 2017 and the Dutch Grand Prix 2021.
I’m aware this video is coming out after the Italian Grand Prix but this video took longer
than I thought and the season is all crammed together. Nonetheless - 91 races, 92 races. It’s
not much difference! Despite the fact that Bottas had the weekend of his season to date in Italy!
Starting with their qualifying performance, if we look at this bar chart here,
we can see how many times each driver was classified in each particular position.
I don’t think anyone will be surprised to see Hamilton shows a clear advantage over Bottas.
Hamilton scores a pole far and away more than any other result on a Saturday.
Or… sometimes a Friday I guess. Sprint qualifying is really messing things like
this up for people who like clean statistics. 45% of Hamilton’s quali efforts have ended in
pole position during his time alongside Bottas with a further quarter of times resulting in
second on the grid. He scores 13 thirds, 9 fourths and then only 8 times off the front two rows.
Bottas meanwhile, took pole less than a fifth of the time but was very strong for second and third,
taking the second two slots on the grid over half the time.
And if you look at their average positions - Lewis’s mean quali result was 2.48th,
with Bottas only 7-tenths of a position behind on 3.18 - so if Mercedes did just need someone
to back up Lewis’s title challenge, Bottas was doing just what they needed. And this is
something we’ll get back to, don’t you worry. And we can compare this Hamilton/Bottas
partnership against others. Like Hamilton… and Rosberg, his former team mate.
They raced together for 78 races from 2013-2016, the last three of those
seasons being the start of Mercedes’ dominance. Over that time, Hamilton took pole 47% of the
time and second 27% of the time - incredibly comparable to his performance against Bottas.
But Rosberg was on the front row much more than Bottas - 74% of the time
compared to a 45% success rate from Bottas. This front row hit rate is almost identical
to Hamilton’s 76% across the same period. And interestingly, due to his strong consistency,
Rosberb edges Hamilton on mean performance - 2.42 in qualifying to Hamilton’s
3.24. Those two really were close - often to anxiety inducing levels for Mercedes.
The distribution of Bottas’s qualifying results against Hamilton are shaped more similarly
to those of Webber against Vettel during their 94 race partnership across five seasons which
including four years of double-championship wins. Through this incredibly strong era for Red Bull,
Vettel had an incredible pole position hit rate, with 44 poles to Webber’s 12, and an average
qualifying position two places higher than Webber. Looking at these results, Webber did very much
sit in the number two seat - perhaps more than he ever liked to admit. Bottas holds
up a little bit stronger in this regard. And the other - slightly different - pairing
I wanted to take a look at was Max Verstappen at Red Bull versus the amalgamated statistics
of everyone he’s been paired with there. So I’ve glommed Ricciardo, Gasly,
Albon and Pérez into one ‘Other’ driver across the 109 races Verstappen has been at Red Bull.
There’s a big difference here as Red Bull hasn’t been the dominant
package of this era so Max’s qualifying performance is centred around 3rd, 4th,
5th places with his team mate generally a little worse off.
But I wanted to keep this partnership in play as Red Bull have had this ongoing
‘second driver dilemma’ as they search endlessly for the perfect partner for Max,
while Mercedes have been extremely happy with Bottas sitting alongside Hamilton.
So we’ll be looking more into this pairing too as we continue to illustrate some performances.
If we get rid of this chart now and look at direct quali head-to-heads - that is,
how many times one driver out-scores the other in quali, Lewis beats Valtteri fairly robustly 59:28
across qualifyings where they both reached the same session. More than two-thirds of the time.
We can split this across their seasons to see this is fairly consistent year to year, though Hamilton
has taken a bigger chunk this year as he’s upped the ante to focus on beating Verstappen.
And if we just look at pole positions, Lewis has taken the lion’s share each year - except for 2019
where Bottas matched him five-for-five. 2019 did seem like a year where Bottas was stepping up his
game but it never quite reached that next level. But beating Hamilton one third of the time in
qualifying isn’t that bad, really when you consider Vettel and Verstappen’s
team mates only managed it a quarter of the time. Only Rosberg came close to Hamilton,
out qualifying him not-quite-half the time. But did Merc really want another Hamilton/Rosberg
battle? Or did Bottas represent the strong but demonstrably less quick driver more suited to
managing the team’s efforts as a whole? For more on that, let’s put qualifying
aside now and look at race results in much the same way, across the same periods.
And we can see again the tremendous win rate Hamilton has pulled over the
last 91 races in comparison to Bottas. Lewis has grabbed a win in 51% of the
races they’ve contested together. Bottas, in comparison has only won 10% with 9 victories,
but again has a high hit-rate for second and third place. Half of his results fall on the
lower steps of the podium which… you know, is probably exactly what Mercedes want from him.
But Hamilton, on average, is finding 2.4 places over Bottas in race results which is
a not-insignificant gap. That’s the kind of gap that could worry Mercedes as that’s where their
rivals can park themselves and gain much needed points, instead of having Bottas hold them back.
And of the races they both finished (of which there were 82), Bottas ended up 808 second
behind Hamilton in total - an average close to ten seconds per race, meaning there were a fair
number of races where Bottas was too far away to be play the wingman role and apply pressure
to rival drivers. We’ll get to that in a bit. Nico Rosberg had a much stronger bag of results
than Bottas, hitting first and second with extreme consistency - 59% of the
time. More than Lewis’s 57% across the same era and much more than Bottas’s
40% rate during his time at Mercedes. Nico was only half a position behind Lewis on average.
But Bottas grabs better race positions than Webber did against Vettel. Webber was a lot
less consistent - partly down to the fact that his Red Bull wasn’t quite as reliable as the
bullet-proof Mercs of the last few years. And obviously the Verstappen era is less
skewed towards wins as the others but you can see his hump of results is markedly higher than
his teammates and he finishes on average one position higher than them. Which is,
actually, not too bad a showing from the drivers in the other seat considering
how much Red Bull have been agonising over it. Switching back to Bottas - across his 91 races,
Hamilton beat him in races 68 times or 75% of their shared results.
Again, this year has been particularly bad for Bottas, having only beaten Hamilton twice
up to Zandvoort - and we can directly compare this to 2018, another season
where Hamilton was focussed on genuinely fighting drivers outside of his own team.
In this case, Vettel and Ferrari put up a real title fight and Bottas found himself
completely squeezed out of the party. Rosberg as you might expect, held stronger
against Hamilton, breathing him 42% of the time. Again, not quite half of the races,
but a respectable challenge that was evident across their three championship battles.
But Bottas’s efforts to beat Lewis race-on-race are worse than Webber managed against Vettel AND
those of Verstappen’s team mates, who all managed to outrace their superstar partners more than
a quarter of the time. As a caveat,
Merc’s aforementioned hyper-reliability and Hamilton’s minimal retirement rate has
given Bottas less opportunity to overcome the odds than perhaps the others managed.
In terms of outright wins, Bottas has only bagged 16% the team’s victories,
a statistic not helped by a complete lack of wins in 2018, even as all four drivers from Red Bull
and Ferrari took almost half of all victories that year. Having said that, Bottas was on to
win the Russian Grand Prix before being asked to move over via the infamous “Valtteri,
it’s James” radio call. He also has no wins,
thus far, in 2021 but then Hamilton isn’t overflowing with them either,
yet. But again - in years where Mercedes are fighting off external forces,
Bottas’s results disappear as rival teams and drivers fill the gap he leaves to Hamilton.
For all the talk from Mercedes of Hamilton and Bottas being equal drivers, it’s clear
Valtteri is loved in the team for the strong support role he plays.
And, you have to say, it’s a role he’s brought on himself for all his hatred of being called
a wingman or so-such. If he could challenge Hamilton for poles and wins and titles more often
then he would have, and would almost certainly have been allowed to - just as Rosberg did,
for all the headaches that brought. But it’s well suspected that Merc have loved
keeping him on board for the very reason that he’s a strong, decent driver… but not a rival to
Hamilton. Not enough to consistently cause grief. He’s well placed so that Mercedes can manage their
campaign in a streamlined Hamilton-focussed way. Bottas’s 16% win race pales to Rosberg taking
41% of Merc’s wins but is closer to Webber’s 19% and the Other Red Bull driver taking 23%
of the wins - situations with much more clear secondary drivers, results wise.
And in terms or total points scored across their partnerships, all of Bottas,
Rosberg, Webber and the Other Red Bull Driver scored between 50 and 60% of the
teams points. Which is what you want really, isn’t it? There’s nothing shameful in that.
Now you can’t ignore that the Hamilton/Bottas partnership has yielded four drivers’ titles
and four constructors’ titles (all in Hamilton’s favour, of course) and that Mercedes have achieved
all of this with a lot less aggro than they did across the Hamilton/Rosberg years.
And this is all well and good when you’ve had the good fortune
(and skill, yes) to race from the position of dominance that Mercedes has enjoyed.
But once external pressures come into play - like Ferrari in 2018 and Red Bull in 2021 - they
need their second driver to maximise their points haul, block out the higher positions
AND be in a decent position during the race to apply pressure to their rivals.
And this doesn’t just mean fighting with and overtaking rival cars on track, but by being
close enough to the action to allow Mercedes to play strategically. If Bottas is close to the
Max/Lewis fight then he can scare Red Bull into pitting early but coming in to scoop the undercut.
You can’t spook your rival team into abandoning their ideal strategy if you’re too far behind
to come into play, and that leaves Merc to fight single handedly and hope Perez,
or whomever, isn’t close enough to throw his own spanner into the works.
And so enters George Russell. With Russell, Merc have brought two key elements to bear.
The first - they think they can squeeze more performance out of that second seat.
Now, there are definitely still some question marks over Russell. He’s pulled some incredible
performances out of his Williams, particularly in qualifying, and showed tremendous form in his
one-off sub-in for Mercedes last year, nearly winning in a car he didn’t fit in properly.
But he doesn’t have a strong race-craft record in F1 - mostly because he hasn’t
been in a position to demonstrate it. His superstar qualifying performances have
faded on Sundays when the Williams, for the most part, could not keep up the fight over a race.
And he certainly hasn’t had to run the kind of races Mercedes run from the front, with the
pressures of poles, wins and championships on his shoulders - not since the Formula 2 days,
and F1 is whole different kettle of fish. He’s going to have to elevate himself in
that Mercedes seat and be the driver the hype expects of him. He’s definitely a
top-tier driver. But now he has to deliver it, every weekend. Against the very best.
But do Mercedes want him to be… too close to Lewis?
If George is challenging for wins and poles on the reg, that will put Merc in that
uneasy position they has in the Rosberg years - especially if their dominant days are over
and they are having to fight off Red Bulls and maybe even McLarens and Ferraris and
who-knows-what else in 2022. It’s already a year of question marks.
But look - it’s better to have two strong drivers fighting for the maximum possible
results than one supreme driver and another who may or may not be there when it counts.
And with that comes the second key element George brings - a look to the future.
Mercedes have to look beyond Lewis Hamilton. He’s one of the oldest drivers on the grid and
talk of his retirement has been circulating the last few contract rounds. He’s in til 2023 and
after that… who knows? We are definitely at the very tail of his F1 career, either way.
Elsewhere teams have been firmly planting seeds to bear fruit for the next generation: Max at Red
Bull, Leclerc at Ferrari, Norris at McLaren. All promising young drivers, grabbed early in order
to develop them for the big things to come. If Mercedes didn’t get a hot young driver in
to nurture and develop first-hand for the next era, then… they could easily be left
empty-handed at the wrong moment. If Lewis hadn’t renewed his contract this year, they
would have had to parachute someone in to fill some very heavy boots at the last minute. Would
a Russell/Bottas 2022 pairing be up for a full on title assault? It would have been a big ask.
So farewell then Valtteri Bottas, from Mercedes. You were, for the most part, exactly what the team
needed to reach their goals. Race winner and pole sitter,
but crucially - not a title contender. A strong, talented racer. But not a threat.
May you thrive at Alfa Romeo, free to be the very best you can be.
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