Valtteri Bottas reveals how ‘painful’ training for F1 led to ‘eating disorder’

Valtteri Bottas has revealed that his desire to be the best led to an 'eating disorder' that he had to see a psychologist to recover from.

Valtteri Bottas reveals how ‘painful’ training for F1 led to ‘eating disorder’

Valtteri Bottas

Sportspeople never have it easy with fitness. It’s imperative to prepare and maintain your body at a good level for optimum performance. The same goes for Formula 1, and endurance training in particular is often taken to an extreme. But it’s also important to control your weight (in both directions) so a strict diet is also necessary. Valtteri Bottas had a particularly bad experience with this in his debut season.

After winning GP3 in 2011 while serving as Williams‘ test driver, the Finn then served as their reserve driver for 2012. His debut finally came in 2013, where he finished P17 with only 4 points scored. This was still 3 more than his teammate, Pastor Maldonado, who had won a race the previous season. Bottas’ fortunes would improve drastically in 2014, but not before some hard times.

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In an interview with Maria Veitola, Bottas described how his training regimen developed into an ‘eating disorder’. He said: “I trained myself to pain physically and mentally. It got out of hand, and it became an addiction. No eating disorder was officially diagnosed, but it was definitely there. It wasn’t very healthy. I wanted to be the best, and I thought I had to do that. If the team says that I have to weigh 68kg and I naturally weigh 73kg, then they will do everything for that.” as per RacingNews365.com.

Read More: Valtteri Bottas praises ‘really motivated’ new Sauber boss Andreas Seidl

Valtteri Bottas had ‘no other life than F1’ in his early days

People can go to extremes to get what they want, abandoning everything in a mad pursuit of their ‘dreams’. This isn’t healthy, of course, and is also unlikely to be fulfilling. But Formula 1 drivers often need to make such sacrifices (though not often to such an extent) to get the edge in a sport where the margins between a win and a loss are often just milliseconds. Valtteri Bottas went through something similar, to such an extent that he needed to see a psychologist.

The Alfa Romeo driver said: “I needed a psychologist to help me recover, whose first assessment of me was that I’m almost like a robot who only wants to reach his goal and has no feelings at all. It startled me. It’s true that at that time I had no other life than F1.”

After his time with Williams, the Finn went to Mercedes, which was also stressful for him in its own way. Now, he’s at Alfa Romeo. He seems to be enjoying racing and life a lot more now, particularly because he’s on a multi-year contract. Being under less stress is obviously going to help his performance, and he was the team’s ‘main man’ in 2022. Fans will be hoping for more of the same in the upcoming season.

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