Vasseur: Bottas knows how to motivate the team

Thanks to Valtteri Bottas, Alfa Romeo has made more than significant progress, as he managed to earn points in six of the seven races of the season. Frederik Vasseur is sure that this has become possible, because the Finnish rider motivates the whole team.

“From my point of view, he has done a perfect job from the start of the season. If there were any problems, it was only because we ran too few kilometers during the winter testing,” the head of the Swiss team said in an interview with RacingNews365. It just works great.

What Valtteri brings to the team is much stronger outside the cockpit, in meetings with the engineers and at the Hinwil base. First, he thinks of the team, not himself, who are trying to do the best for all 500 employees.

Every time he comes to base to train on the simulator, he spends more than two hours going through all the departments one by one. He tries to raise the morale of the team, and in my opinion this is a very important part of the job, although invisible.

Alfa Romeo probably has 250 fewer people than Alpine or Williams, we don’t have such a big team, so everyone has to work as efficiently as possible. And not only Valtteri works in this way, but also his partner, Guanyu Zhou.

Bottas is convinced that he is one of those responsible for motivating the entire team. When he arrives, he is on the podium, addressing everyone. It is very difficult to estimate how much this improves the results on the circle, but it is extremely important. All employees need to be sure that the end result depends on each of them – if they don’t think so, motivation drops.

When a team performs well overall, it comes into the limelight more often, attracts sponsors’ attention and increases its budget, contributing to the car’s modernization process. And this is the key to success, and Bottas knows how to get this message across to everyone who works at the Hinwil base.

Our professional relationship started more than 15 years ago, so his success doesn’t surprise me. Valtteri first played for my ART team in 2009, we know each other very well and have been in constant contact ever since.

I don’t want to compare us to Mercedes as they were champions seven times in a row anyway, but there he was always in the shadow of Hamilton, although I was always convinced that once Bottas took on the role of team leader he would be a become a very different person. And now he has chosen this direction.