Valtteri Bottas may be one of the lucky Formula One drivers in recent years to have avoided a five-place grid penalty as he returns to full-time Grand Prix racing this weekend at the Australian Grand Prix with the Cadillac F1 team.
Bottas performed reserve driver duties for the Mercedes-AMG F1 team last season after parting ways with the Sauber F1 team (now Audi) at the end of the 2024 season. During his last race with Sauber, the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, he made contact with Sergio Perez, leading to a grid penalty.
If a driver is penalized in the last race of a season, he serves the penalty in the first race of the subsequent season. However, Bottas didn’t secure a seat for the 2025 season, which helped him escape the penalty last year.
For 2026, he secured a seat with Cadillac, but due to the nature of the regulations, he will not be liable to serve the penalty in the season opener in Australia this weekend. A rewrite of Article B2.5.4 of F1’s sporting regulations confirmed that he will not have to serve the grid penalty this weekend. The regulation reads:
“Classified drivers who have 15 or less cumulative unserved grid penalties for the Race imposed in the previous twelve [12] months will be allocated a temporary grid position equal to their Qualifying session classification plus the sum of their unserved grid penalties.”
Coincidentally, he is paired with Perez this season at Cadillac, who also didn’t have a seat in F1 last year after parting ways with Red Bull following the 2024 season.
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Valtteri Bottas Targets Progress With Cadillac F1 Team
Bottas was asked on media day if he felt rusty getting back in the car after a year on the sidelines. He said:
“I haven’t actually – I felt alright! I got plenty of testing, much more testing than normally you get before the season, and I think those few test days I had last year helped keep a bit of a feeling.
“But I have to say, actually, a few things are different. I never expected to be actually kind of happy to be in a press conference! After one year off, it’s like, it’s not bad. So yeah, [I] have a different perspective now.”
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When asked what his objective for this year was, he said:
“Progress – that’s the number one thing. We need to get better from the start of the year to the end of the year, which I hope we will.
“Like I said, we’ve had hard work already, but the hard work continues going ahead. With the new power units, with the new cars, it’s the same kind of for everyone, but we have been building everything from scratch, so we need to keep going, keep getting better in all the areas.”
