Valtteri Bottas: "no one knows how motivated I am" to win an F1 World Championship

Mercedes driver Valtteri Bottas has said that “no one knows how motivated I am” to win “at least” a first Formula 1 World Championship of his career, believing his performance gap to Lewis Hamilton is getting smaller.

Bottas’ 2019 season has been his best yet since joining the Silver Arrows in 2017, winning four races in Australia, Azerbaijan, Japan and the United States, while finishing on the podium at 10 other races.
 
His consistent performance has helped Mercedes to a sixth constructors title in a row and guaranteed himself a second-place finish in the drivers championship behind Hamilton with two races to go.
 
But the Finn feels there is still room for improvement and can close the gap to the Brit soon.

“Every driver always keeps improving and as long as you want it, you can improve,” Bottas said (quoted by Crash.net).

“Lewis always wants it all the time, he’s not chilling out, he’s always working to improve, but at least from what I can see and the team can see too, our relative performance gap is getting smaller and smaller and, for sure, I haven’t yet reached my peak. So, it’s up to me to work on it and improve.

“There’s no doubt he’s motivated to win I don’t know how many championships but no one else knows how motivated I am, deep inside, to win at least my first title.”

Bottas started the year very close to Hamilton before some mistakes cost him losing ground to the Briton in the standings throughout the season, one of those crashing out of the German Grand Prix when he was running in second, as well as crashing out of qualifying in Mexico.

“There haven’t been big gaps between us as the averages show really tiny numbers,” he added.

“There are a lot of variables and things can shift quite quickly but the overall performance could always been better.

“There have been mistakes from my side, that cost me better starting positions for the races.

“Mexico is a good example of that, where I stepped over the limit trying to find all the performance from the lap but that can happen.”