Sauber driver Valtteri Bottas needs all the help he can get after a very disappointing start to the 2024 Formula 1 season.
It would be incredibly harsh to pin all the issues Valtteri Bottas is experiencing this year on the Finnish driver, with Sauber having the slowest car on the grid and other issues – such as some awful pit stops – to deal with at the same time.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if Bottas needed some advice on how to navigate what could turn out to be the toughest season of his Formula 1 career.
The Finn was speaking on Instagram about what his idol and two-time F1 world champion Mika Hakkinen once told him.
He’s suggested that it’s the best advice he’s ever been given by a fellow racing driver.
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Valtteri Bottas shares the advice he was once given by racing hero Mika Hakkinen
At the start of the season, it appeared as though Sauber – now formally Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber – were in the midst of a five-team battle trying to break into the top ten.
Zhou Guanyu came within a place of scoring a point at the season opener in Bahrain but it turns out that’s the closest the team have come to getting off the mark.
Valtteri Bottas probably didn’t anticipate being this far behind his rivals at this point in the season.
The team’s one-lap pace is atrocious compared to the rest of the grid, with Zhou regularly miles off the pace of his teammate and everyone else in the paddock.
At times like this, Bottas has admitted that he turns to the advice that Mika Hakkinen once gave him.
The two Finns had very different careers in F1, with Hakkinen the lead driver at McLaren when they were winning championships in the late 1990s, while Bottas was a support driver for Lewis Hamilton in the same position.
That doesn’t mean that the knowledge Hakkinen had accumulated from more than 150 F1 races doesn’t apply to Bottas’s struggles at the back of the field.
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Valtteri Bottas needs all the help he can get for the rest of the 2024 F1 season
Asked what the best advice he had ever received from a fellow racer, Bottas said: “One advice from, actually it was from Mika Hakkinen, he was my childhood hero.
“He advised me once when he saw that I was a bit stressed, that you should go and walk in the woods and I was like, what?
“And he said, ‘Yeah! Just go in the forest and walk, try it!’
“And I tried it and it actually works, like being one with nature is actually, yeah you start to think differently and you start to release stress, so that was kind of cool, simple advice but if you are stressed, go in the woods.”
Bottas may need to take a few walks in the woods when he comes to thinking about his future in Formula 1.
It appears very unlikely that Sauber retain Bottas for 2025 before Audi’s takeover of the team the following year.
Opportunities elsewhere on the grid are beginning to run out as well, leaving Bottas in a difficult position.
It’s been claimed that Bottas has already rejected joining Alpine although he may have to return to that option if nothing else comes up.
One pundit has suggested that Bottas would be a good stop-gap option for Mercedes while Kimi Antonelli gets up to speed.
Bottas could also return to Williams should they miss out on their top target Carlos Sainz.
His name is in lots of conversations right now, but he doesn’t seem the frontrunner for any seat at this stage.
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