Valterri Bottas reveals Toto Wolff could not offer him anything to stay at Mercedes

Furthermore, the prevalence of one-year contracts had resulted in a severe lack of job security, which had begun to weigh heavily on Bottas' mind.

Valtteri Bottas in a file photo. (Image: Twitter)
By Nilavro Ghosh | Jan 25, 2022 | 2 Min Read follow icon Follow Us

Former Mercedes driver Valtteri Bottas has revealed that there were no complicated negotiations with the team regarding his departure, and he knew he had to leave when team principal Toto Wolff refused to extend his contract. Bottas joined Mercedes in 2017 to replace the retiring Nico Rosberg, who had won the championship the previous year. That year, despite a difficult second half of the season, the Finn was rewarded with a one-year contract extension for 2018.

Lewis Hamilton won the championship four times while partnering Bottas, and this meant a supporting role for the 32-year-old, especially at the Russian Grand Prix in 2018, when he had to hand over the victory to his teammate.

Furthermore, the prevalence of one-year contracts had resulted in a severe lack of job security, which had begun to weigh heavily on Bottas’ mind. The 10-time race winner would then leave Mercedes at the end of the previous season to join Alfa Romeo, fed up with fighting for just one more season. As a result, he explains that the decision to stay with the eight-time constructors’ champions was an easy one for him and Wolff.

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“It was honestly like we agreed,” Bottas said on the Beyond The Grid podcast. “It was not like he told me. He knew that, at some point, we need to make decisions, and, already, I had decided myself that if I can’t get two years or more with Mercedes, I’m definitely going to go for something new.”

‘It was quite easy’

The Finn said that Wolff could not place anything on the table that could pique his interest. “And it was a simple question of, can he offer me more than two years, two years or more? And he said, no, he can’t at this moment, and then it was quite easy.”

George Russell, a British signing from Williams, has taken Bottas’ place at the Brackley-based team in 2021. Russell had been a part of the Mercedes junior programme since 2017 and finished third in the bizarre Belgian Grand Prix last year. He filled in for Hamilton when the seven-time champion was diagnosed with COVID-19 in 2020, and he out-performed Bottas for much of the Sakhir Grand Prix before a series of unfortunate events prevented him from winning his first Formula One race. As a result, the Finn believes Russell is the most likely candidate for Mercedes to sign as his replacement.