Valtteri Bottas EXCLUSIVE: The mullet, the personality, the coffee

Social media sensation. Coffee aficionado. Businessman. There is much more to Valtteri Bottas than being a 10-time grand prix winning F1 driver.

In recent years, the 34-year-old Finn has come out of his shell, allowed his personality to shine and embraced his ‘zero f**** given’ persona. He no longer takes himself too seriously and he is enjoying life more than ever.

The Sauber driver’s F1 future may be uncertain beyond the end of the current season, but he has never been more sure of himself. He is happy, confident and relaxed.

While F1 remains the biggest part of life, Bottas has found other passions away from the track. One of those is cycling.

“Outside of the sport, the number one thing that comes to my mind is cycling,” Bottas told Crash.net. 

“I’m a big fan of cycling. Both road and gravel racing. Yeah, a pretty keen cyclist myself. So that’s probably up there after F1.”

This newly-discovered love was sparked by his partner Tiffany Cromwell, an Australian professional cyclist.

“Initially the motivation for me was to keep up with her,” Bottas explains, laughing. “So that’s why I started training. Now I can keep up with her, in most terrains.

“I’ve discovered how addictive it is as a sport, because it is a sport where you are the engine and when you feel the improvement, you get quite hooked.”

So, when he is not racing F1 cars at 320kph, what would the perfect day look like for Bottas?

“Sleep, long. Between 9.30-10am, that’s normally when I wake up,” he says. "Have a good coffee. A good breakfast with some eggs, avocado toast and then do a nice bike ride.

“Then the rest of the afternoon is sauna time, and some good dinner.”

He adds his go-to ‘cheat meal’ is “pretty standard” and would consist of either a “good homemade burger and fries”, or pizza.

Embracing his personality and iconic look

Bottas is one of the few drivers to have stood out for his unique personality over the past couple of seasons. At last year’s Australian Grand Prix, Bottas arrived in the Melbourne paddock rocking a tank top and flip flops.

This is a side to Bottas we did not see during his time at Mercedes. Bottas got his big break in the height of the Silver Arrows’ dominance, but he quickly found himself playing a supporting role to teammate Lewis Hamilton’s championship bids, and having little stability as he was handed year-by-year contracts.

While Bottas enjoyed his most successful period at Mercedes - winning 10 races, taking 20 poles, finishing in the top three of the championship four times and helping the team secure five consecutive constructors’ titles - the demands of years of intense fighting at the front of the grid and being consigned to a ‘wingman’ role had taken its toll.

Losing his Mercedes seat to George Russell for 2022 opened the door for Bottas to find a new home at Alfa Romeo (now Sauber). Here, he was finally handed the security he had been seeking with a long-term deal. Since making the switch to the Swiss outfit, there has been a notable step-change in Bottas’ approach.

“It wasn’t like a switch. It just started to happen. I think a change of atmosphere, a different partner,” Bottas replies when asked when he stopped ‘giving a f***’ about what people thought of him.

“For the first time having some stability in the sport as well. And just being more mature. Understanding how the world works, how F1 works.

“Just started to be more comfortable with myself and actually allow myself to take the piss out of myself and have some fun with things.

"And really understanding in life that not all things should be too serious. I just became more confident, more comfortable within myself and just having a laugh.”

Part of Bottas’ new-found Australian identity is his now-trademark mullet, an iconic look which he began sporting at the end of 2022. He is “loving the mullet life” and has no plans to change it.

“First, it was kind of like a joke,” he explains. “Because in 2022 my hair was actually getting quite long because it was the end of the season and I didn’t have time to go to a barbershop.

“So then I joked to Tiffany ‘when we go back to Australia, I’m going to trim a mullet’. Then she was like ‘yeah, right’. Then I actually booked a place. I knew one local video guy so I asked ‘let’s see if this could be fun, come and film it’.

“It went viral and then it stayed. Then I was like ok, the mullet-moustache combination was actually pretty cool. Quite Australian. A trademark.”

Bottas has embraced social media and starred in funny ads, something he lacked the confidence to do when he was racing for Mercedes. Earlier this year, he recorded an entertaining promo for Uber, even joking that he deserved an Oscar for his performance, which was well-received by fans.

"My social media, I do everything myself and normally if something funny happens, I just try to share it. People like normal, silly stuff,” he says.

“Some things were obviously done by other companies. For example, the Uber car share advert, that was their script. But when I saw it and they asked ‘do you want to do this?’ I was like ‘hell yeah! That looks fun.’

"Not that many things are super planned. Normally with me things just happen, and that’s the fun of it.”

Bottas is not afraid to show himself to the world. This was perhaps most evident when he shared an image of his bare bum poking out of the water while swimming in a river during a holiday in Aspen in May 2022.

The post went viral and Bottas used the exposure for good, raising over $50,000 for charity by selling prints of the image. This later inspired a nude calendar, which made over $150,000 for men’s health charity Movember via sales on ‘www.bottass.com’.

Bottas the businessman

Bottas has entered the business world by investing in three of his biggest passions outside of racing: coffee, gin, and wine. He owns a 20 percent stake in Kahiwa coffee, a local roastery in his hometown Lahti, and has launched his own wine (Ihana) and Gin brands (Oath).

“It’s been interesting,” Bottas says of his business ventures. “Some are going slower than the others. But mainly the things I’m involved with are passion projects and I don’t want to lose money - ideally we’ll make some in the future.

“But it’s more like passion first. That’s why it’s fun to work with those projects when you are really interested. So, pretty good. Having a pretty good base for when eventually racing stops. One day things should be running quite well.

“With coffee or gin, I can kind of choose my workload. Obviously during the season it’s more challenging,” he adds.

“But I’ve got people helping with those so I can kind of choose when I feel like I need other things to work on, I can really focus on those. But I can also leave it for many weeks and there’s people helping with that.”

Kahiwa is still based in Finland but ships internationally. For Bottas, it is all about starting small and avoiding, as he calls it, “silly jumps”.

"We’ve got an online shop so we actually sell worldwide and that’s been growing yearly and yes, eventually we want to expand,” he explains. “But also we don’t want to make silly jumps here and there. So there is a plan in place.

“We actually just got a new big coffee roaster which will give us the opportunity to roast more, so now we can. Before we were kind of limited to how much we could roast. Some baby steps on that.”

A cup of coffee needs to be perfect, according to Bottas. He starts his day with a flat white, before moving on to expresso. He has tried his hand at latte art, however, when shown this writer’s efforts, he concedes they may eclipse his own.

While his future remains undecided, Bottas insists his F1 story is far from over. He has no plans to hang up his helmet and gloves any time soon and rejected the notion that his business start ups are ‘retirement planning’.

“For sure I know that eventually racing stops, I’m not going to fall into emptiness,” he says. “I’ve got things that will keep me busy, but that’s not the main reason. It’s just because I want to do those things.

“Like in any sport, you want to have something that you can start working on when it ends. But it’s not going to be yet though.”