Hamilton hails Bottas as 'amazing team-mate'

Lewis Hamilton has hailed Valtteri Bottas as an 'amazing team-mate' following a season in which the Englishman claimed his fourth world championship, and has backed the latter to improve even further next campaign as Mercedes targets more success via the duo.

Bottas replaced Nico Rosberg who won the title with Mercedes in 2016 only to announce his shock retirement shortly after. The Finn was largely in the shadow of Hamilton in his maiden campaign with the Silver Arrows, but did enjoy some success of his own and won the final Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi.

Hamilton has praised the impact made by Rosberg on the Mercedes team, and has backed him to improve further.

"Valtteri's been an amazing team-mate this year," said the four-time champion.

"It's not easy at all to go to a team for the first year, particularly as you already had plans to be somewhere else at the beginning of the year.

"You then have a very short period of time to get used to a new team, learn the new systems, learn the tools which you'll use during the year.

"It takes a long time to learn how to manipulate the car to help extract your performance, so he hit the ground pretty fast at the beginning of the year.

"Then another part of it is the pressures of fighting for a World Championship is not the easiest of things.

"There are drivers who have sustained a little bit then fallen back and never recovered from that mental fight that you have.

"He's very strong minded and he came back and finished up strong so I anticipate he's going to be stronger next year, so I'm going to make sure I'm on my toes."

Hamilton would go on to praise not just Bottas as a driver, but as a personality. The Englishman did not have a good relationship with Bottas' predecessor, Rosberg.

"There's incredible respect between us and our work ethic is similar and I think our family morals are similar," Hamilton continued.

"Ultimately we want to win the right way through being the fastest on the track, and there's nothing in the background happening at all, there's zero, there's perfect harmony within the team.

"We just want to be quickest on the track, he's not trying to do it any other way but through his talent, and he sees that with me, which is why it's super easy to get on."