Valtteri Bottas has never been shy about the realities of modern Formula 1, but his latest reflections cut closer to the bone than the usual talk of “doing the job for the team”.
In a candid Players’ Tribune column, the Cadillac driver revealed he came within touching distance of walking away from the sport altogether after 2018 — the season that crystallised his role at Mercedes as Lewis Hamilton’s supporting act, rather than a genuine co-lead.
Bottas arrived in Brackley for 2017 as Toto Wolff’s quick, clean solution to an unexpected problem: Nico Rosberg had taken the title off Hamilton and then quit days later, leaving Mercedes needing a safe pair of hands who could win races without detonating the garage. Bottas did win — 10 grands prix across five seasons — but he also became the template for the modern “number two” at a team chasing dynastic success.
He describes starting 2018 in the kind of headspace every driver has to inhabit to survive at the top: total conviction. “I started the 2018 season thinking that I was the best driver on the grid, and that I was going to win the championship,” he wrote. The punchline arrives quickly. “Yeah. I didn’t win a single race. Ha.”
The gallows humour is doing some heavy lifting there, because Bottas isn’t talking about being out-driven every Sunday. He’s talking about those moments that don’t show up in the statistical summaries, but stick to a driver like a burr: being quick enough to win, then being told not to.
“There were races that I could have won, but I was told to move over for my team-mate,” he wrote, before quoting the now-familiar instruction. “Valtteri, let Lewis through.”
For outsiders, team orders are an accepted part of the sport’s machinery — a pragmatic lever pulled in service of championships, constructors’ prize money, and the bigger picture. For the driver receiving them, they can be corrosive. Not because the logic is hard to grasp, but because the job description of a Formula 1 driver is, fundamentally, to ignore logic and believe you can beat anyone in identical equipment.
Bottas is careful not to turn it into a personal grievance. He calls Hamilton an incredible driver and a friend, and insists there’s no bad blood with Mercedes or Wolff. That’s what makes the admission hit: the pain didn’t come from a broken relationship, but from the slow realisation that his best-case scenario inside that team still had a ceiling.
“I was ‘the wingman’,” he wrote. “To this day, I have complicated feelings about it… the whole situation almost made me walk away from the sport.”
What followed, in his telling, wasn’t some dramatic explosion behind closed doors but something quieter and arguably more dangerous: the kind of internal collapse drivers rarely put in print. He spoke about spiralling into obsessive self-criticism and letting social media do what it so often does to athletes already trapped in a feedback loop.
“The old me came back,” he wrote. “The negative Valtteri. The obsessive Valtteri.” Then the line that lands hardest: “I have to be honest … I was definitely depressed and burnt out. I hated racing.”
Bottas said that winter, heading into 2019, he decided he was going to retire. Not as leverage. Not as a threat. As a genuine exit plan.
Then came an epiphany he frames not as some mystical reinvention, but a practical reset: stop torturing himself with the “what if?” and move to “what’s next?” It’s a neat distinction, and one that probably sounds simple only to people who haven’t lived the specific brutality of a career in which milliseconds define your worth.
He returned for 2019 anyway — and, famously, announced himself in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, winning by 20.8 seconds and delivering the blunt message that followed. Bottas now says people misunderstood the moment.
“I don’t regret saying it,” he wrote, “but I’m not sure people really understood what I meant.” He insists it wasn’t bitterness. More like release. “It’s almost like I was saying, ‘Thank you’.”
In the years since, his career has taken turns that would’ve felt unlikely back when he was the polished, compliant half of Mercedes’ line-up. He left Mercedes to join Sauber in 2022, spent three seasons there, then returned to Mercedes as a reserve driver — a homecoming of sorts that also underlined how much the paddock still valued him.
Now, in 2026, he’s back on the grid with Cadillac, leading the American marque’s new Formula 1 project from its very first race at the Australian Grand Prix.
There’s an irony in that arc. Bottas’ lowest point came when he felt trapped by the demands of being a “team player” at the sport’s most dominant outfit. His second act has been built around something far less certain but potentially more rewarding: shaping a new team’s identity, with none of the pre-written hierarchy and none of the inherited expectations that come with being “the other guy” in an established title machine.
The subtext of Bottas’ column isn’t that Mercedes did him wrong, or that team orders are immoral. It’s that F1 has a way of asking drivers to swallow contradictions until they don’t recognise themselves — and that even the people we assume are mentally bulletproof can end up staring at the exit.
Bottas didn’t take it. He walked back in. And if his words are any guide, he’s still unpacking what it cost him — even as he tries to make the next chapter count on his own terms.
