Around halfway through Valtteri Bottas’s fifth year as a Mercedes driver, the world learned it would be his last.
Valtteri BottasBeat team mate in qualifying5/22Beat team mate in race3/17Races finished18/22Laps spent ahead of team mate173/1105Qualifying margin+0.25sPoints226
Had his performances up to that point been at a significantly lower level compared to past seasons, and had the team therefore chosen to drop him? Or was there a different calculation at work? The signs pointed towards the latter.
Yes, there were a couple of conspicuous lows over the opening races for Bottas. Around a damp Imola, he was nowhere, and had already gone a lap down when his race ended in a collision with George Russell, the driver who was widely expected to replace him (correctly, as it turned out). At Baku he gradually slipped backwards and finished out of the points.
But the rest of the time he was in the mix, as in previous seasons. Close enough to Lewis Hamilton’s pace to occasionally…