Formula 1 drivers work hard to get a chance to compete with a team at the front of the field. Only then will they hope to fight for victories, victories and a chance at the world championship with them.
And with Valtteri Bottas leaving Mercedes, who have dominated Formula 1 for the past eight years – to join lowly Alfa Romeo – fresh from a disastrous five-year championship run, Bottas could be forgiven for feeling a little pessimistic about his prospects for the year. in the future. But Botas grew instead. Fully embracing his humble team, Bottas has emerged as a happier and more relaxed driver than he has been in Formula 1 over the past nine seasons.
It helped that Bottas was shaken up to Hinewheel as the new team produced a really good car. Although reliability problems limited their test run, Bottas knew his new car had the potential to score good points. And in the season opener in Bahrain, he proved just that.
Missing the first practice session entirely did little to slow him down and stuck the new car on the third row of the grid. After losing a whole lot of places at the start, he used an impressive sprint in the Alfa Romeo to go up to sixth at the checkered flag, much to the delight of his new team. On the first Sunday of the new season, more than two-thirds of Alfa Romeo’s points haul of the entire 2021 campaign has been achieved.
He had to add more in Jeddah, placing eighth on the grid and running in the top ten before the car overheated causing the power unit to be called to save. But over the next three rounds, Bottas helped himself to a generous points haul, taking eighth at Melbourne and a season-best result at Imola, despite losing ten seconds to the crosshairs during a pit stop.
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He made his first big mistake of the season in Miami, adapting himself to the new circuit. A spin into the barriers in first practice ended Friday, but despite missing a full hour of lap time, Bottas beat former team-mate Lewis Hamilton to fifth on the grid. A small mistake in the race left the hairline and cost both Mercedes places, but he still came home ‘best of the rest’ in seventh place.
The frequency with which Bottas missed Fridays as the season progressed was strange. He suffered a power unit failure in Friday’s practice in Barcelona, but made another strong drive to pick up eight more points. He then overcame another crash in practice to run the entire race in tenth place in Monaco, giving Esteban Ocon an extra point when he was handed a time penalty.
By now Bottas had amassed 40 points – single-handedly placing Alfa Romeo fifth in the Constructors’ Championship. But rookie teammate Zhou Guanyu was gaining more confidence and kept him out of the competition in the next three rounds. He was eighth in Canada but gained another two points after Fernando Alonso was penalized for weaving on the back straight when he caught him on the last lap.
But by the midway point of the season, Alfa Romeo was being overtaken by its midfield peers. Both Bottas and Zhou suffered from poor car performance at the start, which cost them several positions at the start of most races. Ferrari gave the French a new clutch, but if they were to improve their starting ability, losing five places on the opening lap was not the improvement Bottas had hoped for.
In Hungary, he returned to Q3 for the first time since Barcelona, but after dropping out of the points in the race, he was derailed in the closing stages by a fuel system failure – his third technical retirement of the year, having suffered many hardships in practice in the first half of the season.
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Bottas will not see the checkered flag in the following two races. He was the innocent victim of an accident at Spa, where he avoided a spinning Laffy and ended up in a gravel trap, and his car failed for the fourth time at Zandvoort – despite running out of points with his team-mate.
As the season went on, Alfa Romeo slipped back in the pecking order while Bottas struggled to overcome the car’s limited ability. He was also finding his teammate hating him a lot more than he had at the beginning of the year and was even being beaten by Zhou at times. Alfa Romeo were now on a pointless run and Aston Martin were looming behind them in the Constructors’ Championship.
At the team’s last update in the United States, Bottas finished seventh on the grid. With a real chance to score some crucial points for the team, he threw it all away by losing control on the right corner of the 17th lap and going into the gravel out of the race – easily his biggest mistake of the entire season.
A week later, however, he redeemed himself in Mexico. He got the better of Bottas on his season debut by climbing to sixth on the grid between the two Ferraris and despite Pierre Gasly breathing down his neck in the final lap, he drove strongly despite not having the same race pace as those around him. .
After making the wrong tire call in wet qualifying at Interlagos, Bottas finished the Grand Prix 14th on the grid, gaining four places in the sprint. Bottas drove well to score two points in ninth as the Mercedes successor finally secured his first grand prix win – a result that would eventually secure the team sixth place in the Constructors’ Championship.
But when the pressure was on in the final round of the season, Bottas was nowhere to be seen at Yas Marina for the second year in a row. Zhu simply carried it all weekend and looked powerless to offer Aston Martin any sort of challenge. Only Daniel Ricciardo saved the Alfa Romeo from heartbreak as Bottas cruised home a lowly 15th.
For the most part, Botts’ first season with a midfield team did more than his final years as a driver at Mercedes. As the Sauber team enters its final campaign under the Alfa Romeo branding and looks ahead to a promising future as Audi, they will be doing so using Botts’ vast experience and strong team ethos to guide them.
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2022 F1 season review
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