F1 Talk: Ocon to Renault and Bottas Stays; Did Mercedes Get It Right?

Mercedes confirmed today that Valterri Bottas will stay with Mercedes-AMG F1 Team for another season, with another one year contract (though in the Press Release, Toto Wolff hinted he may be looking at more.)

Just an hour later, the news we were all expecting rolled in; Esteban Ocon has been confirmed at Renault alongside Daniel Ricciardo from next year. This of course leaves Nico Hulkenberg without a drive for now as Ocon looks to get back into racing for the first time since he was dropped from Force India at the end of 2018.

Bottas is a very good number two driver and is underrated by most people. Outqualifying Hamilton 40% of the time this season is something only a few drivers on the current grid would be able to do.

Without doubt, Bottas’s main problem is race pace and racecraft. Whenever he is behind Hamilton after lap one, he never seems able to stay with him and drops away as the race progresses.

That said, he is not so slow that he ends up dropping behind the Ferrari and Red Bull drivers. Pierre Gasly is the perfect example of a bad number two driver, Bottas is exactly what you want.

The team are in harmony with no bad blood between Hamilton, Bottas, Toto Wolff, the engineers, mechanics, everyone involved in the team so why risk undoing something when you have the right people who trust each other and will put the team first.

Only one thing can be said to be a problem with Bottas and that is his race pace. But apart from that, he’s a very good driver. The only reason people don’t want to see him in a Mercedes seat is because he cannot challenge Hamilton in the same equipment over a whole season.

We would all love to see Max Verstappen, Sebastian Vettel, Charles Leclerc or Fernando Alonso as Hamilton’s teammate but it’s not going to happen and highly unlikely to happen in F1 (at least not in 2020). Ocon is not on the same level as any of those four drivers, in fact he’s probably on a similar level to Bottas.

But, what if Ocon turns out to be worse than Bottas. After all, he didn’t set the world alight at Force India/Racing Point and if he was really that good, why didn’t Mercedes choose him then. They would not say goodbye to a driver they have brought up if he was amazing.

Clearly, with this move Mercedes are looking at either George Russell or Verstappen for 2021. They don’t see Ocon as a good enough driver to be their future and rightly so. Nobody thought Gasly would turn out to be as bad as he has been at Red Bull this year and as crazy as it sounds, what if Ocon turns out to be similar and Mercedes chose to put him in their car next year.

It’s too big a risk and Toto Wolff would look very silly if Ocon turned out to be much slower than Hamilton in all departments. There is more chance of this happening than Ocon challenging Hamilton over a season in my opinion.

Also, Ocon has proved to be a slightly difficult personality with some people in the paddock as well as drivers (definitely more so than Bottas). That’s a big negative point so even if he turns out to be quick, it’s far from ideal because it will simply unsettle the team just as it did with Hamilton and Nico Rosberg..

For Mercedes, its the right decision. The conservative option but a wise one. For Bottas, he gets another season in a top car and another chance to add to his win tally and should the stars align and Hamilton has a shocker, he could win a world championship.

And for Ocon, he’s the only one who loses out. He waits a year, only to go to a Renault team that is going backwards rather than forwards. At least he has a seat on the grid because he so easily could have been forgotten about and left on the sidelines and had he not been on the 2020 grid, his F1 career would almost certainly have been over.

Meanwhile Hulkenberg is expected to be in talks with Haas F1 over a future drive, though news on his 2020 plans are not expected for some time.