Valtteri Bottas has never been one for melodrama, but even by his standards the past couple of seasons have demanded a bit of emotional accounting. When Sauber pulled the pin on what he believed was an agreed deal, the Finn suddenly found himself answering the same question in every corridor, mixed zone and sponsor event: what’s next?
Eventually, he made it permanent. “What’s next?” went on his thigh as a tattoo — his first — at a moment when his F1 career was sliding from certainty into the grey area drivers hate most. Fourteen months on, Bottas is leaning into the phrase again, only now it’s less about deflecting speculation and more about framing a second act he seems genuinely energised by.
Because in 2026, Bottas isn’t selling a comeback story. He’s selling continuity.
That distinction matters. A comeback implies unfinished business and old ghosts; continuing is about picking up the thread and pulling it forward. It’s also a subtle but telling way of describing his route back towards the front of the paddock conversation — via a reserve role at Mercedes, a mentoring stint alongside teenage prospect Kimi Antonelli, and now a headline-grabbing step into Cadillac’s first F1 season.
Bottas has also revealed how close he came to taking a different path before all of this. He says he nearly signed with Williams for the 2025 season, a move that would’ve been both familiar and symbolic: Williams was where he first established himself as a properly rated operator, long before Mercedes and the race wins. It didn’t happen, and you can read that two ways — a door that never opened fully, or a narrow escape from another short-term bridge deal that might not have offered much more than a name on the entry list.
Instead, the road he’s taken has had an unusual mix of practicality and personality. The Mercedes reserve job gave him relevance and routine. Away from the garage, he’s expanded Oath Gin with his partner Tiffany Cromwell, bought a farm retreat — ‘The Vineyard Retreat’ — in McLaren Vale, and filled the gaps with the kind of domestic details you’d expect from someone trying to enjoy life beyond the circuit: trips to Bunnings, road cycling, gravel cycling.
None of that screams “desperate to get back on the grid”. And that, in its own way, is the point.
The Cadillac project, though, has dragged him back into the meat of it. Factory visits, meetings, seat fittings — the stuff that turns a marketing pitch into an actual racing programme. Last week in Barcelona, Bottas finally drove Cadillac’s new car for the first time, sharing running over multiple days with Sergio Perez as the team accelerates its preparations for 2026.
For Bottas, it wasn’t the finish line of all those “what next?” moments. It was, as he put it, the start.
On social media, he set out what the tattoo has come to represent now that his career has shifted gears.
“For me ‘What’s next?’ has become something deeper than a question,” Bottas wrote. “It’s a mindset. It means believing in the opportunities in the future, rather than worrying about the past.
“So when people ask me about comeback…
“I don’t think of it as returning.
“I think of it as continuing.”
He signed it off with a word that’s been attached to him for years, but rarely deployed so directly: sisu — the Finnish idea of stubborn resilience, the ability to keep moving when the conditions say you shouldn’t.
There’s an easy temptation to roll your eyes at the motivational tone, because F1 is a sport that eats slogans for breakfast. But there’s something believable about Bottas using the language of calm rather than revenge. The paddock can be a brutal place for drivers who slip out of a race seat: the phone stops buzzing, the narrative gets written without you, and you’re expected to smile while someone else takes your spot. Bottas hasn’t pretended it didn’t sting, but he’s also not trying to dress up the past as a tragedy.
What’s more interesting is the shape of the opportunity in front of him. Cadillac is not a nostalgic reunion tour; it’s an unknown, high-variance bet. For a driver with 10 grand prix wins and a decade of experience in top-level structures, being part of a new operation’s foundation is both a challenge and a chance to influence how the team thinks, works and builds. That’s a different kind of leverage than simply being the safe pair of hands filling a seat.
And it aligns with how Bottas has always presented himself when he’s at his best: clear-headed, technically switched on, unafraid to do the unglamorous work, and quietly confident that results come from process rather than noise.
So yes, the tattoo started as a response to an annoying question. Now it reads more like a deliberate refusal to be defined by the moment Sauber said no, or by the seasons that didn’t pan out as planned.
Bottas has answered “what’s next?” plenty of times. In 2026, he’s finally in a position where the answer isn’t a placeholder. It’s a programme.
