F1 | Valtteri Bottas opens up: from childhood porridge to Cadillac F1 journey
There is a road sign on the edge of a rural Finnish road in the autumn of 1996. A six-year-old boy sees it from the passenger seat of his father’s car—a man who cleans industrial warehouses—and asks to turn the car around. His father does. From that moment on, Valtteri Bottas never stopped going round in circles as fast as possible.
This is the opening scene of the long autobiographical piece the Finnish driver published on The Players’ Tribune on April 29, titled “Born Crazy.” Thirty years of career compressed into a first-person letter, written with the disarming honesty of someone who no longer has anything to prove—or perhaps finally has everything to tell.
Valtteri Bottas – porridge and the pedal
The first part reads almost like a Nordic fairy tale. Young Valtteri wants to get into a kart, but he cannot reach the pedals. His grandfather, a farmer and oat grower, promises him that if he eats porridge every day, he will grow enough by spring. Valtteri Bottas believes him. He even learns to cook it himself when his mother gets tired of doing it.
“The snow melts. The child stretches his foot. The pedal responds.” It is an almost too-perfect metaphor for the rest of his career: daily effort, Finnish “sisu”—that untranslatable word between grit and heroic endurance—the thin line between obsession and dependence. Valtteri Bottas never states it directly, but he tells it with a precision that shows long reflection.
The weight trap
The most courageous part of the text is the section about 2014. Bottas was 24 years old, coming off his rookie season with Williams, and the team asked him to lose five kilograms to compensate for an overweight car. He ended up losing much more.
He describes it as a spiral: steamed broccoli and cauliflower twice a day, two 90-minute running sessions, the scale every morning acting like an oracle. He would remove the GPS from his wrist before the second run so his trainer would not notice. He was still driving well. In the car, everything disappeared. Outside, he says, he was a ghost.
The breaking point came with the accident of Jules Bianchi at Suzuka. On the flight back from Japan, with his teammate in a coma, Valtteri Bottas realised he could not feel anything—not even fear for himself. Especially not fear for himself.
He started therapy. It took almost two years to feel normal again. Remarkably, during that period he was still finishing on the podium.
The number two, Toto, and the “f*ck you” in Melbourne
His time at Mercedes is described with the same clarity. The dream move in 2017, followed by the gradual slide into the “wingman” role behind Lewis Hamilton. The radio messages everyone remembers: “Valtteri, let Lewis through.”
Bottas writes that he still has complicated feelings about it. There is no open resentment, but something unresolved remains between the lines. What is resolved is how he moved on: a three-hour walk in a Finnish forest during the winter break of 2019, under the snow. He came back with a decision—to move forward without looking in the rear-view mirror.
The 2019 Melbourne victory, with more than 20 seconds of advantage and the famous “to whom it may concern, f*ck you” over team radio, is not described as anger, but as liberation. A thank you disguised as defiance.
The Cadillac and the restart
The final part focuses on the present. Bottas is now with Cadillac F1 Team, a brand-new outfit and the 11th constructor on the 2025 grid. He describes it as “a firework of positivity.” The tone becomes slightly more promotional, but the honesty of the earlier sections keeps it grounded.
He recalls the first engine fire-up at Silverstone—when Sergio Pérez was driving, not him—and says he had goosebumps. In Melbourne, during the 2026 season opener, he watched the other 21 drivers on the grid during the national anthems and thought about Christmas. A 13th place in China, only the team’s second Grand Prix ever, is described as “almost a miracle.”
He also recounts the flight back from China on a private jet with Toto Wolff, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell—four people talking for hours without cameras. A circle closing.
Bottas has never been a particularly media-driven personality—he says it himself with self-irony, even joking about his old interviews being a cure for insomnia. But over the years he has built a more layered public image, and this text is perhaps its clearest expression: the reserved Finn who learned, gradually, to be honest. First with doctors, then with himself, and now with anyone willing to read.
Thirty years after that go-kart on the roadside, he can still reach the pedals. And that, he writes, is everything.
In summary, Valtteri Bottas’s autobiographical journey from his humble beginnings in Finland to the cutting edge of the Cadillac F1 project highlights a career defined by resilience and total honesty. By opening up about his struggles with weight, the psychological toll of being a teammate to a legend, and the joy of his current technical challenge, Bottas has transformed his public image into one of the most relatable and respected figures on the grid. As he continues to push the boundaries of the 2026 regulations, his story serves as a powerful reminder that performance is as much about mental well-being as it is about aerodynamic efficiency.
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