Valtteri Bottas talks his wild and wonderful racing career

VALTTERI BOTTAS WANTS a gluten-free sandwich. Esquire is on location at the driver’s secluded vineyard retreat, in South Australia’s McLaren Vale. It’s a glorious summer’s day and the vineyard, where Bottas hopes to retire one day, is an especially inviting idyll.

The rolling hills of SA’s celebrated wine region fall away on all sides of a vista that begs to be captured in oil or watercolours. A clawfoot tub sits on the balcony of one of the retreat’s luxury cabins overlooking vines. A guest emerges from another cabin holding a suit – it’s the type of place made for rustic rural nuptials.

Bottas is standing on a gravel driveway in front of an iron shed that doubles as a home gym, as his friend, Paul Ripke, a German fashion and sports photographer and the other half of what’s become one of F1’s more curious double acts – saunters over in thongs. The duo’s gloriously deadpan IG reels have become a hit with F1 fans, taking viewers behind the curtain – and often beneath the sheen – of this most glamourous of sporting pursuits.

‘“Hey, Mr Bottas,” Ripke says, before looking contemplatively at me. “Are you excited about this season?’” he earnestly asks Bottas, mocking the many reporters that have come before me who’ve posed this most pedestrian of questions. “So boring.”

“Bit boring,” agrees Bottas, as I hastily cross the question off my list.

Ripke tells Bottas he’s heading into town, to which Bottas responds by asking for his sandwich.

“Where’s a good one?” asks Ripke.

“You figure it out,” Bottas mutters over his shoulder, as he walks towards the set-up for his next shot.

“I’ll surprise you, honey,” calls Ripke after his friend.

Later, I ask Bottas about the tone of the social reels he and Ripke produce. “We like to keep things light,” he tells me. I ask if there was a catalyst. “Not really,” he replies. “It just kind of happened. I think with age, with experience, you learn not to take it [F1] too seriously.”

You do, indeed. Particularly if your sport is as competitive and cutthroat as Bottas’ is. Where milliseconds spell the difference between daring and disaster and millions of dollars ride on the outcome of every race. Given that context, silly videos, ridiculous haircuts, comical moustaches and breezy banter are probably a perfectly rational response to a pursuit that means everything and nothing.

Bottas, by his own admission, has come out of his shell over the years, becoming a bigger, more engaging, more ridiculous presence in the F1 paddock. Now 36, he was, as a younger man, “very boring, very reserved. Quite shy, almost robotic in a way. I was purely focused on driving and nothing else. I didn’t really have much else in life other than racing.”

As a number 2, of course, you want to be number 1 . . . That's natural. Who doesn't"

Now? Racing remains his primary passion, but it’s one of a portfolio of pursuits that includes gravel cycling, rally driving, owning an ice hockey team, coffee roasting, gin distilling and philanthropy. He’s not quite Tony Stark: “Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist”. But he’s not far off.

So, F1 changed him? “In this sport, you learn so much about yourself,” he says evenly. “Eventually you find that right balance in your life.”

Bottas is calm, reflective, serious, as we sit chatting at a picnic table overlooking a patch of grass in the middle of the vineyard. He’s not the man I expected to meet today. But, of course, even the joker in the pack has two sides.

BOTTAS IS ILLUMINATED in a red glow thrown by a Cadillac Lyriq 600 E4’s rear-windscreen brake light, inside his gym shed. He’s wearing a red Tommy Hilfiger X Cadillac Formula 1 fanwear fleece with black trousers and blue-and-white-striped slides, as he cradles the back of the vehicle in his arms. A pair of Canyon gravel bikes hang on the wall behind him, adjacent to a squat rack, medicine balls, dumbbells, kettlebells and Swiss balls.

The sleek lines of the Lyriq don’t immediately strike you as a potential workout station, but after our shoot Bottas proceeds to make a typically silly video, in which he uses the vehicle to punch out various exercises, including one in which the passenger seat serves as a platform for “neck training”. Predictably, the video lights up the ‘Gram, another example of Bottas’ commitment to “keeping things light”.

Bottas has arrived here in SA the day before, from Silverstone in the UK, where Cadillac Formula 1 Team’s new car touched tarmac for the first time. For Bottas, it’s a flying visit – just a week – during which he’ll find time to finish second in a local gravel race and pump out a few more pieces of bizzarro social content, before flying to Barcelona, where he’ll drive the Cadillac Formula 1 Team car for the first time.

I ask if he’s nervous at the prospect of getting behind the wheel and joining his new team. “No, I don’t feel nervous,” he says, in something of a rebuke. “I feel more excitement because everything is new. There are so many people I need to learn to work with and together learn how to make the most out of each other as a team. So, lots of work to do, learning faces, names and the new car.”

On the importance of immersing himself within the team, Bottas is unequivocal. He’s putting his performance, his life, in their hands, after all. He needs to trust them. “I think it’s really important,” he says of getting to know the team beyond backslaps and nods in the corridor. “If you only know five people out of 600, that’s not good enough. If you want to trust the car, you’ve got to trust the people who make it.”

To some degree you also need to trust the brand that’s kitting you out in slick team clobber not to make you look foolish, even if, for someone like Bottas, looking a little silly is baked into your public profile. Suffice to say, in Tommy Hilfiger, Bottas looks svelte. “Tommy has been involved in motorsports for over 30 years,” he says. “Cadillac has been in the automotive industry and now motorsports, as well. I would say two American icons joining forces is pretty cool.”

I put it to Bottas that the heritage of the two iconic US brands invokes a romantic vision of America, a land that, off the back of Drive to Survive and F1: The Movie, has embraced his sport in recent years. Bottas nods. “For the US to have a real American team, there’s definitely a lot of excitement and support.”

Earlier in the shoot I noticed the hair and makeup artist twirling the ends of the modern art installation that is Bottas’ mullet. You wonder if Bottas’ follicular proclivities extend to his sense of style? A hint of a smile traces his lips. “I’ve been rocking the mullet and the moustache now for a few years and I feel very comfortable with it. I’m not afraid of jumping into different things when it comes to style,” he says, perhaps stating the bleeding obvious. “I’m quite open and relaxed. I feel like I can rock many different things.”

If today’s shoot is any indication, Bottas has elastic range, transforming from clown prince to po-faced professional, as the shot requires. And he remains committed to his semi-ironic, bogan-on-the-golf-course look.

“I say never say never,” he says, on whether he’d ever lose the mullet. “What if I lose my hair? That could be a problem. Then I could have a ‘scullet’. That’s it. Exactly. That could be plan B.”

Might that be rather pathetic? Ordinarily, yes. On Bottas? The content possibilities are endless.

BOTTAS IS STARING wild-eyed at the camera, as if anticipating the ‘lights out’ starting cue at the beginning of an F1 race. Or perhaps he’s resisting the urge to launch himself at the photographer. Despite the apparent animus in his eyes, the Finn’s features remain steadfast and composed.

I’m watching through the cryptic lens of a spider web and recall the image later as Bottas tells me he was a wild child, always moving, exploring, falling. He remained that way until he was six, when he found go-karting. “That was something I could really focus on and deploy my energy into,” he says. “And that’s when I calmed down quite a bit. I could use that energy to drive the car. But before that, I was a mess.”

In one of those serendipitous or fateful moments that seem to define the lives of the prodigiously talented, Bottas discovered karting by accident. He and his dad were doing some shopping in a nearby town when they saw a sign announcing a go-kart championship at a local track and decided to take a look. Bottas watched the little karts speeding around the track transfixed. “Apparently it was the first time in my childhood that I was sitting still and just, like, focused,” he recalls. The young Bottas asked his dad to take him back to the track every day. His dad was happy to oblige, if for no other reason than the pastime gave him some respite from his energetic progeny. There was just one problem: when it came to driving a kart, his son couldn’t reach the pedals.

Bottas was devastated but his grandfather had a solution: porridge. “My granddad told me if I ate porridge every morning over the winter, I would grow and fit into the car the next year when the snow melted,” says Bottas, greenish eyes gleaming at the memory. He duly insisted his parents make him porridge each morning, eventually learning to make it for himself. Sure enough, the following spring, when the snow melted, his feet scraped the pedals.

On his first lap Bottas pushed the pedal to the floor . . . and kept it there through the first corner. “I clearly wasn’t afraid of the speed, but then I learned, Okay, on corners you have to brake”. After that first drive, he told anyone who’d listen that one day he’d be an F1 driver, which lends the tale a mystical providence it probably doesn’t deserve – he certainly wouldn’t be the last snotty-nosed kid to make such a proclamation after a couple of laps on a go-kart track.

Initially, Bottas says, it was the speed that captivated him. Soon it was the sense of control he felt behind the wheel. Later it would be the intensity of competition. “I wanted to get better and better from a young age,” he says. “I think that was my strength as a kid and why I did really well early on in the sport.”

It helped that he had national heroes to inspire him. Keke Rosberg had won the F1 World Drivers’ Championship in 1982. Mika Häkkinen followed in his footsteps in 1998-99 with McLaren, while Kimi Räikkönen would achieve the feat in 2007.

“Häkkinen was my hero,” says Bottas. “That [example] feeds the youngsters. It really makes them hungry, and they can see that it’s a reality that you can make it.”

Is there something in the Finnish psyche that’s suited to motor racing? Bottas considers the question for a moment. “We are quite stubborn and focused on doing things we want to do well.”

Of course, it also helped that Bottas had supportive parents – their efforts went well beyond porridge-making. “Honestly, I can’t remember a time when I asked, ‘Can we go-karting?’ and they said no. They would always take me because they could see the passion.”

Bottas would rise through the ranks of karting and into the lower classes of professional motor racing, eventually landing in F1 on the Williams team in 2010, as a test driver, before making his debut as a full-time driver here at the Australian GP in 2013.

For the first time in his racing life, Bottas would find himself nervous, possibly at a constitutional level. “I had lots of butterflies and a little stomach bug the night before, so I wasn’t feeling very well” – a situation he describes as “not ideal”. Despite a night in which he became intimate with the toilet bowl and would emerge from his room in the morning “white as a ghost”, the race went well. “I hit my targets,” he says.

By the next race, the nerves were gone, but the excitement remained. So did the hunger to succeed. At this point, few could have foreseen that it would be the depth of this determination that would shape as a proverbial pothole in the driver’s ascent to greatness.

THE BOTTAS THAT sits beside me on the picnic table today is not the same man he was 10 years ago. But then, who is? Young, fiercely competitive men are often hardwired to strive for greatness, to sacrifice everything for glory and riches, to make their lives a singular pursuit of excellence. This was Bottas back in 2014, when his desire to succeed saw him push himself to mental and physical exhaustion.

“I was training too much, not eating enough, doing secret training sessions away from my coach, stuff like that,” he says, explaining that weight restrictions at the time further increased the pressure he put upon himself. “And it just came to the point that my energy levels collapsed.”

He suffered heart palpitations and recalls a blood test that revealed his body was beginning to break down. The knock-on effect bludgeoned his mental wellbeing. “It started to affect the head because once your body gets weaker, you can only go for so long with your willpower,” he says. “Eventually, mentally, it gets draining.”

Honestly, I can't remember a time when I asked, ‘Can we go-karting?’ and they said no. They would always take me because they could see the passion.”

It would take more than two years for Bottas to recover fully. The process involved a mental shift, requiring him to step back from the all-consuming pursuit of excellence and to listen, not only to his body, but to those around him who were worried about his welfare. To be not so insular. “I was always quite stubborn,” he says. “Maybe I didn’t listen to the experts or the people. I was like, Oh, I’m going to do things my way. I’m actually glad it happened because now I can really listen to my body and I know exactly how much I can take.”

At this point, it’s tempting to join the dots. To point to the mullet and the mo’, the construction of the comical social media persona and the embrace of a kind of a cuddly caricature of a racing driver, as a deliberate attempt to leaven his approach, not only to Formula 1 but to life more broadly.

Rather annoyingly, Bottas resists the easy armchair psychology, pointing out that it’s a little lazy to grasp at hackneyed therapy-culture tropes to draw a straight line, when life, like the track, is defined by corners. But he admits he needed to recalibrate the way he approached the sport. “When you’re young in the sport, you just want to do everything perfectly and you want to have endless energy to do stuff,” he says. “But we’re humans and at some point, you realise that you’ve got to find that balance. It’s so easy to say now, but you learn that along the way.”

The sport, he says, is a great teacher, its inherent pressure inevitably provoking a reckoning, one that if you’re lucky, invites perspective. “You learn that some things in life are not that serious,” he says plainly.

Bottas survived by turning his focus outward, embracing his love of the outdoors and endurance activities. “It’s good for you to have things to do other than F1,” he says. “I’ve found this is a way to have a really long career in a sustainable way because I have all these other things that I can choose from and it’s really refreshing. They give me energy instead of wasting my energy.”

Foremost among his extracurriculars is gravel cycling, its mechanical purity affording a refuge that sees him morph from driver to self-powered engine. “In that sport, I am the engine. You don’t have the machinery differences between each car; it’s much fairer. There’s no politics. It’s just me on a bike and that’s the only thing that can affect the result.”

F1, being both a team sport and a commercial juggernaut, is less pristine, distinguished by its politics, alive with feuds, sustained by drama, vulnerable to chicanery. Rarely is it fair. In that sense, it’s perhaps a closer approximation of life, as Bottas knows only too well.

BOTTAS’ VINEYARD IS a retreat in every sense of the word. Just 15 minutes from the beach and 30 minutes’ drive from Adelaide, it’s difficult to imagine somewhere further removed from the helter-skelter of F1.

Bottas first came here back in 2020 with his partner, Tiffany Cromwell, a pro road and gravel cyclist who represented Australia at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. He fell in love with the area, and when ‘The Vineyard Retreat’, as it’s officially known, went on the market in April last year, he pounced, eyeing it as a place to settle down once he calls time on F1. “I feel like I have everything here that I need from life.”

Chatting to Bottas in such relaxed surrounds, it’s easy to forget the Finn’s standing in his sport and, indeed, in his homeland. To cast him within the pantheon of Aussie sporting stardom, he’s somewhere between Shane Warne and Nedd Brockmann, a place where notions of national and folk hero intersect. Given the way we venerate our athletes and have embraced the relative success of our F1 drivers, Bottas’ humility and commitment to comic understatement mean you can find yourself forgetting just how big a star he is.

I’ve found this is a way to have a really long career in a sustainable way because I have all these other things that I can choose from and it's really refreshing. They give me energy instead of wasting my energy"

If you’re not an F1 tragic or need some reminding, this is a man who finished second in the Drivers’ Championship twice, in 2019-20, with Mercedes, and has won 10 races with 67 podium finishes, over 12 seasons. In that time, he’s been both a no.1 driver and no.2 driver. He’s clear on which position he prefers.

“As a number 2, of course, you want to be number 1,” he laughs. “That’s natural. Who doesn’t? Every driver, including myself, is there because we want to win. And if you get told you’re not allowed to win, it’s hard to accept. But that is part of the sport. It’s not a fair sport. It’s very political. So, you’ve just got to deal with it and wait for your moment in the future.”

Bottas found himself in situations that required patience and acceptance in his stint at Mercedes, where he raced behind seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton. “I obviously tried my best to beat him and I managed to do so in many races and qualifying, but over the whole season I never did,” he says. “But I learned a lot from him, and it shaped, I think, the person I am today. In the end, we became friends.” In the end? “Yes, it took a few years.”

Bottas stresses that, on some teams, including the Cadillac Formula 1 Team, there is no hierarchy. “We’ve always made it clear that it’s me and Sergio [Pérez], working together for the team and not against each other,” he says. “And with equal treatment. I would say that’s the ideal scenario.”

Last year saw Bottas take something of a career sabbatical, returning to Mercedes as the reserve driver. The freedom allowed him to spread his wings even further, showing up to support Adelaide United at a couple of home games, going scuba diving, surfing, sailing and officiating as celebrant at a Vegas wedding, among an eclectic range of diversions. But as a natural competitor, he admits he had itchy feet – an itchy foot? – at times.

“It was a little less stressful than a normal F1 season,” he says. “I still had to be ready for each weekend, but I was on a different schedule. I could sleep a bit longer in the mornings. I could leave the track a bit earlier, small things like that. But overall, I still missed racing. It was not an easy year, but I kind of had to do it. I think it was good for me to do it, but to stay present within the sport, because this sport is always evolving.”

The launch of the Cadillac Formula 1 Team certainly heralds a new era in the sport – though, after Ripke’s earlier remark, I’ve managed to resist asking Bottas if he’s excited for the season ahead. Instead, I frame my final question around the team’s competitive goals in its first year.

“We want to show to ourselves, but also the world, that we belong here,” Bottas says. “The main thing is not where we start from. It is where we end up.” If this sounds like a corporate mission statement or cloying Ted Lasso-ism, you might find it within you to shelve the cynicism for a moment and grudgingly acknowledge the aphorism’s truth.

You might also forgive me, as I watch Bottas change out of his Tommy gear before disappearing down a dirt road on his gravel bike, for concluding that this curious, complex man and his wonderfully whimsical career speak to another rolled gold, if heavily soiled truth: wherever you’re headed, it doesn’t hurt to have a little fun along the way.