Bottas not worried about 2019 team orders at Mercedes

©Mercedes

Valtteri Bottas insists that he's not worried that he will be going into the 2019 season already relegated to supporting driver status.

After taking three wins in his maiden year at Mercedes, Bottas had a tough sophomore season in 2018 and missed out on adding to his victory tally.

It meant that for much of the year he was obliged to put his own ambitions aside and support team mate Lewis Hamilton's ultimately successful bid for a fifth world championship.

Bottas: Inconsistent 'massive balance issues' impacting Mercedes

But it's left the 29-year-old Finn under pressure to prove himself heading into this year's new season, with Esteban Ocon waiting at the wings to step in should the team decide that Bottas isn't making the grade.

However he's confident that he will be starting back on an equal footing with Hamilton and that there will be no hangover from 2018's disappointment.

"I have no concerns," he told the media at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya last week during pre-season testing.

"Last year there was a big gap between Lewis and myself, then things were slightly different," he said.

"There was definitely a point in the season - I can’t remember the exact place - but it was pretty clear at some point that I was not going to be fighting for the championship.

"You have to try and reset and make new targets and that’s what’s not always easy," he admitted.

"[This year] it’s going to be up to me," he continued. “Obviously we’ll see how the season goes."

Bottas came close to winning races in 2018 in China and Azerbaijan only to be thwarted. Later in the year he was told to hand over his lead in the Russian Grand Prix to Hamilton, which definitely didn't go down at all well with the driver.

While there's no guarantee that Bottas won't find himself in the same situation in 2019, Bottas is confident of the team's complete support at the outset of the new campaign.

“I have no concerns [about team orders] because we have agreed something already a couple of years back and it’s going to be up to my performance.

“My target for the year is to win as much as I can," he added. "There is only one target for the whole season – the world championship – for me personally, and also for us as a team."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.