The dream of arriving in Formula 1 soon turned into a nightmare for Valtteri Bottas, which retraced the beginnings of the adventure in the paddock. The search for competitiveness has led the Finn to a real obsession, starting from weight loss and culminated in the thought of end your career in Formula 1. Then the help of his ex-wife and a psychologist put the Finn back on track, who confessed in a long interview with the Italian media.
“I had to get on a plane and my ex-wife (Emilia Pikkarainen, ed) he wished me the flight was fine. I replied saying that it didn’t matter if the plane crashed: in that case I would simply die. These are the kind of thoughts I started having, as if nothing mattered any more. In 2014 I took myself to a severe state of fatigue, purely for my stubbornness. So we had to reduce our weight to a minimum, and I have completely lost control. I had to weigh myself every morning and evening, and the weight was less and less. I was obsessed, sometimes I completed a running exercise twice: once with my coach, the other alone, without being seen. I thought it would do me good, but in the long run it obviously didn’t“, Bottas confessed to the Finnish newspaper Iltalehti.
“I had physical problems before. I got tired very easily and couldn’t sleep. Every night I woke up at 4 in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. This has affected my mental well-being: when you have removed every bit of your physical form, your mental side also empties. At one point Emilia told me that I should seek help, because I was no longer myself. I had become a kind of ghost and the death of Jules Bianchi was also a hard blow: it took me two years to recover. I suffered from arrhythmia and sometimes thought it was the end. There was a time when I began to feel drained. My whole life was F1 and I didn’t like it at all. I thought about quitting“, Concluded Bottas, who thanks to the help of a psychologist then found the strength to go on. “Something had to change, I took too many things too seriously. I got help, I began to take everything more lightly. And slowly I found my shape again“.
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