Valtteri Bottas

Valtteri Bottas drives car #77 for Cadillac in 2026, with 10 victories, 20 pole positions, and 67 podiums from over 240 race starts through the end of 2025. Born in Nastola on August 28, 1989, he spent five seasons alongside Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes from 2017 to 2021, contributing to five consecutive Constructors' Championships and finishing Drivers' runner-up in 2019 and 2020.

There is something genuinely strange about Bottas's career arc that a statistics summary misses entirely. He won 10 Grands Prix, led more laps than almost any driver of his generation who never won a title, and was regularly the fastest driver on the grid in qualifying trim. He was also comprehensively beaten by his teammate in the championship every single year at Mercedes, and arrived at each pre-season as the subject of serious speculation about whether he would keep his seat. That tension between undeniable pace and the specific difficulty of matching Lewis Hamilton across a full season defined seven years of his career, and created a public identity that never quite resolved: was Bottas a top-five driver in the world, or a very good number two?

By 2022 at Alfa Romeo, and then Sauber, he found something that looked like liberation. The car was slower, the finishes less glamorous, and the championship pressure nonexistent. He also became one of the more genuinely interesting human beings in the paddock, posting naked cycling photographs for charity, speaking with unusual candour about mental health in elite sport, and developing a social media presence that operated on a different register from the careful corporate positioning most F1 drivers maintain. The Finnish stoicism was always there; the self-deprecating warmth was something that emerged once he stopped being evaluated primarily as a potential world champion.

At 36, joining Cadillac as one of America's first works F1 entries since 1987, Bottas is doing something no career biography could have predicted in 2021: pioneering. He partnered Sergio Perez for the inaugural season, bringing the institutional knowledge of what a Constructors' Championship operation looks like from the inside. Cadillac's engineers have never built an F1 car before. Bottas has spent a decade inside the machine. That knowledge transfer has a value that does not show up in race results but will shape every development decision the team makes through 2026 and beyond.

Finnish fans watch in EET (UTC+2), one hour ahead of CET. Most European rounds start at 15:00 or 16:00 Finnish time, comfortable Sunday afternoon viewing. Check Finland time for full timezone conversions across the season. The nearest race geographically is the Finnish Grand Prix at Kymi Ring, if calendar expansion continues, but for now the Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring is the closest European round.