Valtteri Bottas once gave his new teammate, Sergio Perez, some critical advice for keeping an F1 seat.
Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez have been announced as teammates for the new 11th team on the F1 grid, Cadillac. They are an experienced duo with 16 wins between them, but both Perez and Bottas were sidelined in 2024 by their former teams.
Bottas was replaced by George Russell as Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes teammate, and Perez was ousted as Max Verstappen’s teammate by Red Bull. Both drivers have the experience of racing alongside a serial winner, and Bottas had some advice for Perez during his struggles.
Valtteri Bottas offered Sergio Perez advice for surviving as Max Verstappen’s teammate
Bottas was Hamilton’s teammate for five seasons and helped Mercedes to the Constructors’ title in every year he was there. While Hamilton racked up the Drivers’ titles, Bottas discovered his role as his reliable sidekick and enjoyed a series of successful seasons for the Silver Arrows.
Perez’s career looked to be following in a similar direction. An impressive 2020 season, in which Perez claimed his first win, saw the Mexican sign with Red Bull. He helped Verstappen win his first title in 2021 with immense defensive driving during the final race, but he eventually fell victim to Red Bull’s second seat curse.
Poor seasons in 2023 and 2024 meant Perez was miles off the pace of his four-time world champion teammate, and he was swapped for Liam Lawson. Lawson lasted only two races with Red Bull.
During Perez’s difficult stretch, Bottas offered some advice as someone who has been in the same difficult situation.
He told Motorsport Magazin in 2023, “You have to have this attitude [that you can beat anyone]. You can’t go into a race weekend and tell yourself you can’t beat him. You would have already lost.
“In this sense, it is a sport in which you always have to have good self-confidence and convince yourself. If you don’t have that trust, you’ll end up in a difficult downward spiral. You can see that on the stopwatch and the consistency.
“I would say, looking at what Checo is going through, he’s definitely lacking some trust. And you can see that in the results.”
Cadillac favours experience in their first F1 season
Not much is known about Cadillac ahead of the new 2026 regulations. But Team Principal Graeme Lowden has made one thing crystal clear with his driver selection: experience is everything.
This is a brand-new team that has to quickly get to grips with everything to do with the sport. That extends beyond designing a quick car and setting a race strategy. They need to learn about logistics, regulations and procedures. Every bolt tightened and every bit of data analysed needs to be done in the most efficient way possible.
There’s no room for an inexperienced rookie. Having two drivers in the car who know exactly how to conduct themselves throughout a race weekend is priceless. They know exactly how the car should feel, exactly what practice programmes they want to run and exactly how to communicate that to the team.
Furthermore, the team will need to put in little effort to bring the drivers into the world of F1. Rookies need to learn from their teams, but what Cadillac needs is to learn from their drivers. They have exactly the right pairing to do precisely that.