Bottas is Confident that He’s Matching Hamilton

Mercedes AMG Petronas driver Valtteri Bottas believes he has been “more or less” hitting his 2018 targets. The Finn is also satisfied with his pace compared to his rivals.

The 28-year old is in his second season with Mercedes. For the 2018 season, he has 58 World Championship points to his name after five races. He has scored podium finishes in Bahrain, China and Spain.

Bottas is currently third in the standings behind team-mate Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel respectively. However, he is pleased with his consistent and competitive streak.

“I think this year I’ve been meeting more or less my targets with the performance for the beginning of the year,” Bottas said.

“I’ve been able to continue the good performance since the end of last year and there’s been no weekends that I’ve been really way off the pace like there was a few last year.

“So I think I’ve learned from those.”

He knows that there is still room to improve, especially with his future at Mercedes on the line.

The Finn added: “I need to continue my development. There’s never things that you can’t learn more. I still hope I keep improving.

“But there’s been mixed races and the end results haven’t been really I feel sometimes quite there that I think would have been possible with the pace we had.

“And also like [last Sunday] the gap to Lewis [Hamilton] was huge but I think there’s many things that affected that today.

“So I’m happy and I know we can win races, I know the speed is there for that this year, it’s just extremely difficult but it’s possible and it will come.

We’re so early in the season. I hope I’ve had my bad luck for the year.”

In the coming weekend, the F1 paddock travels to the principality of Monaco.