Valtteri Bottas goes into his third season as a Mercedes driver off the back of a crushingly disappointing 2018 campaign.

He landed one of the sport’s most coveted seats at the end of 2016 when Nico Rosberg, who had stunned F1 by beating team mate Lewis Hamilton to the championship, shocked everyone again by announcing his immediate retirement.

Speedily promoted from Williams, Bottas played himself in at Mercedes during 2017. He won his fourth start and added two more victories by the end of the season. The team rewarded his results with another year on his contract.

But 2018 proved a year of what ‘could have’ and ‘should have’ been. Likely victories lost to misfortune in China and Azerbaijan. And, most galling of all, the instruction to hand victory to Hamilton in Sochi.

The effect this had on Bottas’s performance was obvious. Having started the season on a par with his superstar team mate, he was a shadow of that driver in the final races.

“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’m not going to be fighting for the championship,” he reflected when speaking to RaceFans and other media at the Circuit de Catalunya this week.

“The end of last year was pretty… as a driver, once you have certain goals for the season, once you work hard for it and that kind of gets taken away, you have to try and reset and make new targets and that’s what’s not always easy. It was pretty obvious last year when I knew that at the end of the year can be difficult.”

Having taken time during the off-season to rest, cultivate a beard and drive a World Rally Car, Bottas believes he’s put distance between himself and the bitter end to last season.

“I’m not worried at all,” he said. “Carrying on the negativity from from last year I think vice versa, maybe it was good for me.

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“I feel really good now. I managed to kind of forget all the negativity and whatever was left on me. I managed to turn that into motivation.”

His motivation is to “win as much as I can”, he said in response to a question from RaceFans.

“I didn’t win a race last year and the only one target for the whole season is the world championship for me personally and for us as a team.”

That means beating Hamilton, a driver increasingly regarded as one of the sport’s all-time great, who is at the peak of his powers. But Bottas says he has beaten Hamilton before and can do it again.

“It all comes down to again details in this sport,” he said, “that is to try and be best me I can.

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“I can’t change certain things how I drive and so on but like I’ve said before I know what I can do if I can perform on my best level.

“I’ve been able to be matching and being ahead of Lewis in qualifying or race days and I know I can do it. And now it’s just hard work to be there more consistently than in the previous years.”

The other pressure for Bottas in 2019 is the knowledge that Mercedes’ rapid junior driver Esteban Ocon is jealously eyeing his seat from the sidelines. But that may add little to the burden of expectations on a driver who does not spare himself when it comes to self-criticism.

Last year “was a disappointing season and even kind of nearly made me angry to myself that in my six years in Formula 1 one I haven’t achieved my target yet,” he remarked.

“Obviously I do have time but I’m starting to realise that you definitely have only one career and I don’t want to be in a situation again that I feel like that and I start to question myself, if I could have done something better.

“So this is what we want, to make sure this year I do everything I can to achieve those targets. I’m willing to do basically whatever it takes for me to achieve those.”

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2019 F1 season