Bottas was backed up by Felipe Massa at Williams before joining Mercedes to accompany Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes.
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Valtteri Bottas is “ready” to take on the task of driving an F1 team up the grid, according to Alfa Romeo team principal Fred Vasseur. After a spectacular five-year spell with Mercedes, where the team won consecutive constructors’ titles, Bottas will take over as team captain when partnering Guanyu Zhou at Alfa Romeo this year. Bottas was backed up by Felipe Massa at Williams before joining Mercedes to accompany Lewis Hamilton, making this his first season as a team leader.
“[There’s] much more responsibility than when you are in a team,” Vasseur said. “If you have a look, Mercedes, they won the last six or seven championships. Sometimes only with the points of Lewis, they would have been a team champion. It means that when you start and you are the Lewis teammate, you are in the shadow. You don’t know what is the expectation. Okay, you have to do the best, but you don’t have a mega responsibility. I think that now Valtteri is at the stage of his career that he is able to afford this.”
Explaining what Bottas can bring to his newfound responsibility, Vasseur added: “‘Okay, Valtteri, you are not just the driver, you are responsible for the performance of the teammate.’ I mean that you need to bring your teammate with you, you need to push on the engineer, to push on the factory, to go to the wind tunnel, to motivate the guy in the simulator.”
“If you think that someone is a bit down 10 weeks in a row, to go behind him and say, ‘Guys, wake up, let’s push.’ This position is crucial and Valtteri is ready to do those things.”
Read More – We’re in very different stages of our careers: George Russell on Lewis Hamilton
New Mercedes driver George Russell has stressed the importance of working together with new teammate Lewis Hamilton over competing on the track. Russell has joined the Constructors’ Champions to replace Valtteri Bottas, who has moved to Alfa Romeo for the 2022 season. Last year, the 23-year-old scored his first points for Williams at the Hungarian Grand Prix, followed by his first F1 podium at the weird Belgian Grand Prix a few weeks later. He filled in for Hamilton at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix after the serial world champion was ruled out owing to a COVID-19 positive test.
