Bottas Reveals Weight Issues During Williams Years

Valtteri Bottas has broken his silence. The Cadillac driver, known in recent years for his smile and his extracurricular hobbies, has confessed in The Players' Tribune the dark moments he lived at the beginning of his career in Formula 1: "My whole identity revolved around racing, I didn't care about anything else. It's not a problem until it becomes a problem and in 2014, it became a big problem," he recounted.

The origin of the drama was an innocent suggestion, at Williams, his team at the time, they asked him to lose five kilos to lighten the car, Bottas, obsessive and compulsive by nature, turned that indication into a dangerous spiral: "Five kilos? Why not ten? We can make the car faster. Basically, I started to stop eating," he confessed.

His diet was reduced to steamed broccoli and cauliflower: "I can still smell it," he assured. He got up every morning and weighed himself, if the number went down, he felt great satisfaction. His body began to languish, but he did not see it: "I looked in the mirror and liked my increasingly thinner silhouette, I looked sick, but I had never felt better," he admitted.

The Finn acknowledges that his condition was so serious that he would get up at four in the morning with his heart racing: "I was like a drug addict because I felt good about it, I looked like a drug addict," he declared without mincing words. On the podiums (he scored six in 2014) he smiled, but at home he was "a ghost," his trainer noticed something was wrong, but Bottas told everyone that everything was fine.

The turning point came with the tragedy: "The click came when I lived a very dark day, when my teammate Jules Bianchi crashed at Suzuka." The Frenchman died nine months later from the serious injuries suffered in that accident: "At that moment I didn't care about anything, I remember my girlfriend wished me a happy flight and I thought: 'who cares if the plane crashes, who cares?' If I die, then I die," he confessed.

It was then that Bottas began to seek help, he changed his mentality and began to be the driver we know today, the one who shares on social media his passion for cycling, running and healthy living, but without unhealthy obsessions: "I no longer found fun in racing, I had to change," he explained.

Now at Cadillac he is living a much healthier second stage. His testimony, brave and necessary, is a wake up call about mental health in elite sport.