Bottas doubted himself during 2017 slump

London : Valtteri Bottas admits he was overthinking and starting to drive unnaturally when his first Formula 1 season with Mercedes began to go awry.

While team-mate Lewis Hamilton took control of the championship battle with four wins from five grands prix after last year’s summer break, Bottas started struggling to get the Mercedes to his liking and fell off the pace.

He arrested that slide with pole for the penultimate race in Brazil and then a win in the Abu Dhabi season finale, but admits his run of poor performances had been mentally draining.

“After struggling quite a lot for a couple of races, it wasn’t easy mentally because I was quite confused in the beginning - like, ‘what’s going on?’,” Bottas said.

“For sure you also start to doubt what you’re doing.

“Then also when you need to change some things with your driving style and need to adapt to many different things suddenly you realise it’s not that simple.

“Then you easily overthink things and then it becomes less natural driving.

“But it’s going to a much better direction. If there’s going to be similar struggles [in 2018] I’m prepared for that.

 “And I’ve learnt massively from those difficult races so I think I’m a lot better driver as well than for example in Spa or Malaysia or Japan.”

Though F1 underwent a huge change in aerodynamic regulations for 2017, Bottas believes the fundamental characteristics of the Mercedes remained consistent with the cars Hamilton had driven for the previous four seasons.