Valtteri Bottas pulled over by police while ‘driving faster than he was in a Sauber’ | F1 | Sport

Valtteri Bottas was pulled over by law enforcement while enjoying his off-season with girlfriend Tiffany Cromwell, with some fans joking that the Finn was ‘driving faster than he did for Sauber‘ in 2024.

The 35-year-old has been posting a series of wild videos to social media channels with the tagline ‘What’s Next?’ recently, including self-supported Ironman-distance triathlons and tattoos, and fans got their latest fix after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

In a video posted to Instagram, Bottas was pictured in the driver’s seat of a stationary car, alongside Cromwell who was filming. “What’s next?”, he asked, before gesturing to the right wing mirror. In the reflection, a law enforcement officer was standing outside of his vehicle, pulled up behind the Finn’s machine.

In the comment section, fans were making light of Sauber’s miserable 2024 challenger, insinuating that Bottas had been pulled over for breaching the speed limit.

“Sorry, officer. This car is faster than the one I have at work,” joked user ‘bettercallpaul’, while ‘lex_inker’ commented: “Cop: sir do u know how fast you were going? Val: faster then I was going in a Sauber.”

Despite Sauber’s season to forget, Bottas headed into the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi with a chance to score points for the first time in 2024. He qualified ninth with a lap that he labelled one of the best of his career, but things went calamitously wrong on race day.

The 10-time Grand Prix winner tagged Sergio Perez into a spin on the opening lap, earning him a 10-second penalty that was served during the first pit stop. Then, later in the Grand Prix, he locked up at Turn Six while defending from Kevin Magnussen, crashing hard into the Haas racer and bringing his final appearance for the Sauber team to a premature end.

The former Mercedes man won’t look back on his time with the Hinwil-based team fondly. “It was a mistake,” he said in Abu Dhabi, discussing the decision to join Sauber in 2022. “But we can’t predict the future.

“Everything started well off in the first year, but since then, it was downhill. But we just can’t predict future, that’s how it is. Just want to make sure that the next move I make is going to be a good one. Hopefully, there’s better times to come.”