If RaceFans did an end of year series ranking drivers who had enjoyed themselves the most during the 2023 season, Valtteri Bottas would be a lock for a top three spot.
From unleashing his inner bogan by sporting a rat-tail and a moustache to publishing his own nude calendar, Bottas became one of the more colourful characters on the grid in 2023.
Since losing his seat at Mercedes at the end of the 2021 season, Bottas has found a loving new home in Alfa Romeo. As the senior driver in a team for the first time in 2022, Bottas seemed to flourish in the role of team leader at a modest midfield outfit.
He scored 49 points in his first season at Alfa Romeo – a large bulk of which over the first third of the year – to help his team to a brilliant sixth place in the championship. But while Bottas and team mate Zhou Guanyu were hopeful they could at least build on that in 2023, their car simply did not have the speed they were hoping for.
Instead, Bottas scored just 10 points over the entire season – only slightly more than he managed in his first race with the team in 2022. With one of the slowest cars in the field, Bottas was easy to overlook during 2023. But looking a little deeper at his season, his performance was better than it might appear at first glance.
Although Zhou fared better against him in their second season together than during his rookie campaign, Bottas still had the measure of his younger team mate. He finished ahead of Zhou almost twice as often in the 17 rounds where they were both classified and spent more than half of the racing laps ahead of him. But it was qualifying where Bottas was comfortably the stronger of the two, winning the season-long duel 16-6. Bottas secured a better grid slot eight times in the final nine rounds of the season between Monza and Abu Dhabi.
But Formula 1 is about far more than beating your team mate – you’re occasionally going to have to beat other teams too if you want to score points. Bottas managed to get into the top ten on four Sundays in 2023, including the opening race of the season in Bahrain, where a brilliant start put him in a strong position and he made the most of it to take the ‘best of the rest’ position of eighth, beating the Alpine of Pierre Gasly home by a second.
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He came close to adding to his total twice more in Australia and Monaco with two 11th place finishes, gaining four places during…
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