Bottas "ready" for "crucial" Alfa Romeo responsibility

Alfa Romeo team principal Fred Vasseur is confident Valtteri Bottas is "ready" to take on the responsibility of driving an F1 team up the grid.

Bottas will assume team leadership when partnering Guanyu Zhou at Alfa Romeo this year having spent a successful five-year stint with Mercedes in which the team won successive constructors' titles.

Bottas was supported by Felipe Massa whilst at Williams before partnering Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes, meaning the upcoming campaign will be his first leading a team.

When put to him by GPFans in an end-of-season interview that Bottas' happiness with the switch stemmed from his first multi-year deal in F1 and a team leader role, Vasseur pointed out: "[There's] much more responsibility than when you are in a team.

"If you have a look, Mercedes, they won the last six or seven championships.

"Sometimes only with the points of Lewis, they would have been a team champion. It means that when you start and you are the Lewis teammate, you are in the shadow. You don't know what is the expectation.

"Okay, you have to do the best, but you don't have a mega responsibility. I think that now Valtteri is at the stage of his career that he is able to afford this."

Explaining what Bottas can bring to his newfound responsibility, Vasseur added: "'Okay, Valtteri, you are not just the driver, you are responsible for the performance of the teammate.' I mean that you need to bring your teammate with you, you need to push on the engineer, to push on the factory, to go to the wind tunnel, to motivate the guy in the simulator.

"If you think that someone is a bit down 10 weeks in a row, to go behind him and say, 'Guys, wake up, let's push.' This position is crucial and Valtteri is ready to do those things."

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