Bottas confident he is reaching "required level" to be a Mercedes driver

Valtteri Bottas feels he is performing well enough to keep his Mercedes seat despite poor results. Bottas is currently below both Ferrari drivers and Daniel Ricciardo in the standings.

The Finn is still without a 2019 contract as he looks for his third year at the German team. He's had his fair share of bad luck this season as he was in prime position to win both the China and Azerbaijan races until a safety car and puncture struck respectively.

He started from pole in Austria, but a mechanical failure forced him to retire.

"It puts me in a decent place this year that even though I've not scored the points I would have wanted, I always performed at the level the team requires me to do," Bottas said in an interview on motorsport.

"I'm more or less on the level I want personally. That's a good thing even though only the team sees in great detail how I perform every week."

In qualifying, Bottas has been a lot closer to his British team-mate Lewis Hamilton. The average time difference is currently 0.059s.

"Overall performance has just been closer, there have been less bigger gaps between me and Lewis. No matter if the car's been good to drive or very difficult to drive, I feel I've been able to extract what there is and it's been quite close," added Bottas.