And now it’s the moment that you’ve all been waiting for… the teammate comparison of Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas on Mercedes! Bottas had a big pressure to perform well after his last-minute Mercedes upgrade. Did he live up to expectations?
While Hamilton was clearly statistically superior in terms of performance, Bottas didn’t actually do as bad as everyone was kind of expecting him to do. Moving to Mercedes, the team that has been dominating for many recent seasons, is obviously a huge amount of pressure, but Bottas lived up to that quite well.
Hamilton collected around 60 points more than Bottas, which is a result of having 6 more race wins than the Finn. Despite having fewer wins, Bottas was on the podium equally as many times as his British teammate. When you factor out Bottas’ sole retirement, the duo actually have a really close average finishing position of just higher than P3.
When you look at qualifying pace, Hamilton has an advantage over Bottas and the same can be said for race pace. Regardless, the pair are actually pretty evenly paired given the situation and it will be interesting to see if Bottas can get closer to Hamilton’s performance now that he has familiarized himself with the team.
