Bottas reveals F1 battles that nearly broke him

Valtteri Bottas says Formula 1 pressure pushed him into an eating disorder in 2014 and later left him close to quitting during his Mercedes years, in a Players’ Tribune essay that lays bare the cost of chasing performance at the top of the sport.

The 10-time grand prix winner wrote that the first crisis began at Williams before the 2014 season, when he was told the car was expected to be overweight and that he would need to lose five kilograms to compensate. Bottas said that kind of target immediately became an obsession. “If you put a clear goal like that in front of me, I am going to obsess over it,” he wrote. “When you tell me five kilos in two months, my brain thinks, ‘Five? Why not 10? We can make the car even quicker.’”

What followed, he said, went far beyond normal preparation. “Basically, I started starving myself,” Bottas wrote, describing a period when weight loss became “completely consuming.” He said he would weigh himself every morning and feel “a deep satisfaction” when the number dropped, even as the physical damage mounted. Bottas said he developed heart palpitations while training, his nerves were “shot,” and he burned out “mentally and physically.”

He also made clear how isolated he felt inside the paddock. Bottas wrote that only his coach and doctor knew what was happening, while he kept the struggle from his team, his team-mates and even his family. “In the paddock, you can’t show any weakness,” he said.

Bottas identified Jules Bianchi’s crash at Suzuka in 2014 as the point where that denial finally broke. He described the flight home from Japan, with Bianchi in a coma, as “a very, very dark day.” After receiving a text from his ex-girlfriend wishing him a safe flight, Bottas wrote that his reaction frightened him. “If the plane goes down, who cares? I will disappear and it will be over. I didn’t find joy in anything anymore.”

That was when he sought psychological help and, as he put it, admitted aloud that he “was unwell.” Bottas said the recovery was slow, taking almost two years before he felt like himself again.

The same mindset, he wrote, resurfaced later at Mercedes. After replacing Nico Rosberg for 2017, Bottas said he entered 2018 believing he could become world champion, only to end the season without a win while helping Lewis Hamilton’s title campaign against Sebastian Vettel. He said he had to “sacrifice multiple victories” for the team, and the role left him deeply conflicted.

“Do you know how badly I wanted to just say no?” Bottas wrote of team orders to let Hamilton through. “But I had to be a good team-mate.” He said he still has “complicated feelings” about being cast as “the wingman,” adding that there is “no bad blood” with Hamilton, Mercedes or Toto Wolff, but that “the whole situation almost made me walk away from the sport.”

By then, Bottas said, the old destructive habits had returned. He described himself as “definitely depressed and burnt out,” said he hated racing, and admitted that during the winter before the 2019 season he decided he was going to retire. A solitary walk in deep snow for around three hours changed that decision.

The reset showed immediately once racing resumed. Bottas opened the 2019 season in Melbourne with a victory of more than 20 seconds, launching the strongest rebound of his career. He would go on to win 10 grands prix across five seasons at Mercedes before later leaving the grid and returning with Cadillac.

Now 36, Bottas wrote that he still carries the same competitive obsession, but with a healthier perspective around it. “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, and I’m the best driver I’ve ever been,” he said, a striking contrast to the periods when Formula 1’s demands left him starving, burnt out and ready to disappear from it altogether.