It was hard to miss Valtteri Bottas either out of the car, sporting his eighties-vintage Keke Rosberg mullet and moustache, or inside the day-glo green Sauber. Unfortunately his performances invariably failed to catch the eye, which was more due to the quality of his hardware than his driving.
You’d be forgiven for failing to notice him at all until the final race of the season, where he knocked Sergio Perez into a spin during what proved the final race for both drivers. But if Perez conspicuously failed to perform in the quickest car last year, Bottas struggled to catch the eye at all in the slowest.It might have been a different story had Sauber’s operation been sharper at the start of the season. The team experienced problems with their pit equipment over the opening races, which scuppered their drivers’ hopes of nabbing points finishes early in the season when they were slightly more competitive. Bottas suffered costly pit delays in Australia and Japan, the latter following a particularly strong result in qualifying.
Single-lap performance was where Bottas’s value to Sauber was most obvious. He out-qualified his less experienced team mate Zhou Guanyu regularly, and showed Sauber the true pace of their car, however inadequate it often was. True, Bottas was usually the first one to get the team’s upgrades, but it didn’t always help him as the team sometimes found their new parts didn’t perform as expected. Nor did it help matters that Bottas abruptly received a new race engineer soon after the start of the season, as it took a while for the partnership to gel.
Valtteri Bottas
Best | Worst | |
---|---|---|
GP start | 9 | 19 (x4) |
GP finish | 11 | 19 (x2) |
Points | 0 |
Other niggles stood in the way at times. Bottas was running one place outside the points in China when his power unit let him down. He made bold strategy calls in tricky conditions at Montreal, for no reward.
Bottas’s starts have often been a weakness of his. Again last year he seemed too timid at times, losing precious places on the opening lap. As the season wore on, for a long time it looked as though he might leave F1 last in the standings.
That didn’t happen, but he did miss the chance to score Sauber’s only points finish, which Zhou grabbed in Qatar. Bottas’s race was spoiled when he was hit by Lawson, then later struck debris while he was being lapped. That combination of misfortune in an uncompetitive car summed up his miserable season.
RaceFans’ driver rankings are based partly on the scores awarded to drivers for their performances in each round as well as other factors.
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Edvaldo
22nd January 2025, 13:26
When the car improved, he quickly put it on Q3. There is not much to be done with such a weak car and disjointed team.
anon
22nd January 2025, 15:42
It does kind of sum up this review in a few ways, as it feels like more of a review of the flaws of the team than saying much about the drivers (as it feels like you could say similar things about Zhou’s season too).
Bottas didn’t necessarily do anything that caught the attention of the public in either a positive or negative way – the few successes are largely overlooked, and his ability to stay out of trouble meant he did little to make people criticise him either. However, most of that stems from the team being so anonymous during the season that Bottas could have driven around in the same state of undress as his calendar and most people would still not have paid any attention to him.
It says a lot that most of the talk this year were questions about the future of the team and whether Audi wanted to backtrack on their investment, and about their lack of progress towards the 2026 regulation package, than about what was happening now. This year was very much a holding pattern with Audi trying to work out what it was doing, and it feels like both drivers were dragged down by that malaise around the team.
Ben Rowe (@thegianthogweed)
22nd January 2025, 22:56
Yea I really do think it is down to how bad the car is. His 2018 season was much worse than this, and while other drivers performances impacts positions, he was rated 11th or 10th then and that was clearly a worse season. I also do feel that if Bottas had had a bit more luck in races like Bahrain, China, Qatar and one or two others, given Zhou managed to grab 4 points, I would say that if Bottas had Zhou’s luck in Qatar and the few other points he missed out on, a realistic points number would be 7 or 8, which I am certain would impact his position in these rankings.
His last race certainly was poor, but his level of mistakes has been less that any other driver, and he’s had plenty of decent drives, and not many that were noticeably poor.
It doesn’t seem right at all to me that drivers like Magnussen who got a race ban have been rated higher. I also couldn’t rate Albon higher given how much better that car has been and there have been several races I can remember Albon making mistakes and Bottas getting a better result.
The car is what makes the difference with a lot of drivers. Hulkenberg has made loads of pretty big mistakes this year, as well as some excellent drives, but on balance, I wouldn’t say he’s been that much better than Bottas, and if they were in the same team, I don’t believe Hulkenberg would have an easy time against Bottas and would probably say Bottas has the edge – mainly because of him making virtually no race ending errors and Bottas did look better when they were both in midfield teams.
BasCB (@bascb)
23rd January 2025, 9:33
I agree that there seems to be a large dose of the rating of the car getting in the way of rating the driver this year.
bosyber (@bosyber)
23rd January 2025, 14:29
Thanks for that well written and considered post. I really would have liked a more balanced outcome of car vs. driver with a closer look at what drivers were doing with the car compared to what it was capable of.