Racing
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Valtteri Bottas says he is not worried about his Cadillac future despite fresh speculation over his seat and another back-row qualifying result for the team at Zandvoort, insisting: “I’ve got my ticket here for next season and I’m only going to focus on continuing here.”
The Finn was asked about the possibility of Americans behind the Cadillac project eventually pushing for Colton Herta, who is currently in Formula 2 pursuing the Super Licence points he needs. Bottas made clear he does not see that as an immediate threat, even as Cadillac’s first Formula 1 season continues without a point.
He also pushed back on the idea that age could count against him. Bottas will turn 37 between the Dutch and Italian Grands Prix, but said that is “a good age to continue my career.” He said his physical condition has not slipped, his reaction times remain the same as when he started racing, and that “at no point have I felt that anything has degraded.” As he put it, “Nothing has deteriorated.”
That confidence in his own level comes against a bleak competitive picture for Cadillac. Bottas said the team still has not solved its core problems and was blunt about the current ceiling of the car. Even if reliability issues disappeared, he said, Cadillac “would not yet be able to get into the points” because the pace deficit remains too large. In a normal race, he said, the car is currently capable of finishing “somewhere between 18th and 20th place.”
Zandvoort underlined that reality. Bottas finished 19th in the Sprint and then qualified 21st for Sunday’s 72-lap Dutch Grand Prix, while team-mate Sergio Perez was 21st in the Sprint and 22nd in qualifying, leaving Cadillac on the back row once again.
Bottas linked some of the instability around the project to the growing pains of a new team. He said the mid-season replacement of Graeme Lowdon by Marcin Budkowski as team principal came as “a surprise in the middle of the season,” but described it as “a certain American way of doing things.” In Bottas’ view, “when you see something needs changing, then it gets done quickly.”
For now, though, Bottas’ message is that neither his place nor his form is the issue. The bigger problem is a Cadillac car he openly admits is still too slow and too unreliable to escape the lower reaches of the field, which leaves the team’s next step defined less by driver speculation than by whether it can turn its first season around at all.