- Hours after spinning out of the Sepang race with zero points, Valtteri Bottas climbed on a gravel bike instead of a flight and started riding the 350 kilometers to Singapore.
- He has not scored a point in 16 Grands Prix this season, with eight retirements for Cadillac’s debut F1 team, and the ride has become the one part of his week where nobody can take anything away from him.
- His partner, professional cyclist Tiffany Cromwell, rode alongside him through Malaysian backroads, long gravel stretches, and whatever wildlife crossed their path before he arrives in time for his mandatory Thursday media duties.
Valtteri Bottas Swaps His Formula 1 Seat for a 350 Kilometer Gravel Bike Ride
Valtteri Bottas spun out of Sunday’s race at Sepang, climbed out of a Cadillac that has not scored a single point all season, and did something almost no other driver on the grid would even attempt between Grands Prix. He got on a bicycle. Not for a recovery spin around the hotel car park, but for a multi day, 350 kilometer ride across Malaysian back roads and gravel tracks, all the way to Singapore, where the next race weekend waits for him. “Yes I am riding to Singapore,” he posted, “on the gravel roads less travelled.”
Most drivers fly. Bottas rode nearly six hours on the second stage alone, covering 161.91 kilometers through the Malaysian countryside, chasing a feeling his race car has not given him in sixteen Grands Prix.
A Season With Nothing to Show for It
The numbers explain why a bike ride sounds better than another debrief. Bottas sits 22nd in the drivers’ standings. No points through sixteen races. Eight retirements. At 37 years old, in Cadillac’s first season on the grid, he is living through the kind of year that would push plenty of drivers toward the exit rather than toward a longer route to the next race. He is choosing the longer route anyway, and that choice says something about how he is actually handling a season gone this wrong.
A result like Sepang, where he spun out and added another zero to a year full of them, would leave most competitors wanting to disappear into a hotel room. Bottas disappeared onto a bike instead, and the difference between those two reactions is the whole story here. He is not running from a bad season. He is running a different kind of race through it, one where the result is entirely his own to control.
The Gravel World Championships He’ll Miss
Cycling is not a side hobby Bottas picked up to pass time between Grands Prix. He qualified for the Gravel World Championships this year after finishing fifth in his age category at a Czech off-road event over the summer break, the kind of result that would be a career highlight for most weekend racers and barely registers as a footnote next to his day job. He will not make that start line. The event clashes directly with the Singapore Grand Prix, and Formula 1 does not pause its calendar for a driver’s second sport, however seriously he takes it.
He has built a life around that second sport in ways that go beyond his own results. Bottas co-founded FNLD GRVL, an annual gravel race held in Finland, turning a hobby he loves into an event other riders now travel to compete in. When the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix was canceled in 2023 after floods swept the region, Bottas did not take the sudden week off. He raced an off-road cycling event in Scotland instead, filling a gap in his racing calendar with a different kind of racing entirely.
A Partner Who Understands the Appeal
Riding 350 kilometers through gravel and backroad heat is not a solo mission. Bottas’s partner, Australian professional cyclist Tiffany Cromwell, rode alongside him for the trip, turning what could have read as a lonely gesture into a shared one. Cromwell has built her own career at the top level of women’s professional cycling, which means Bottas is not dragging a reluctant passenger through Malaysia. He is riding with someone who chose this exact kind of suffering as her profession, and who posted videos of the journey alongside him as it unfolded.
That detail says more than it first appears to. A driver struggling through a winless season could easily turn inward, and plenty have. Bottas instead built a multi day physical challenge around a relationship that clearly treats endurance sport as something to share rather than escape. The videos from the road show two people riding into Singapore together, not one man working through a crisis alone.
A Veteran Who Has Already Seen Every Side of This Sport
Bottas is not a rookie learning how to process a bad year. He spent five seasons at Mercedes alongside Lewis Hamilton, picked up ten Grand Prix wins, and finished as championship runner-up twice, in 2019 and 2020, in a stretch when Mercedes won nearly everything on offer. He knows what winning feels like from the inside of the sport’s biggest team. He also knows what the other end feels like, having spent recent seasons at Alfa Romeo and Sauber scrapping for points with a midfield car before Cadillac brought him in to help build its debut season from nothing.
That range is part of why the bike ride reads less like a stunt and more like a coping method he has built over a long career. A driver who has only ever known winning teams panics when the results dry up. A driver who has already lived through the Sauber years, fighting for fifteenth on a Sunday afternoon, has a different relationship with a difficult season. He has done this before, in a slower car, with less attention on him, and he came out the other side of it still racing. Cadillac’s winless debut season is its own kind of hard, built around a brand new operation still learning how to build a competitive Formula 1 car, and Bottas is one of the people the team brought in specifically for that reason: he has survived difficult years before without losing his nerve.
Why a Driver Chooses the Hard Way
Formula 1 gives its drivers charter flights, five star hotels, and every convenience a modern paddock can offer between races. Bottas had all of that available to him after Sepang and picked gravel roads and six hour stages instead. The ride works as a physical reset after a race weekend that left him with nothing to carry forward in the standings, and it works as something closer to proof of life: a reminder, even to himself, that effort still produces a result he can see and feel, even when his Cadillac refuses to give him one on Sundays.
He is due in Singapore before his mandatory media duties on Thursday, which means the ride has to end exactly where the next round of questions about his winless season begins. There is no hiding from those questions in a paddock this small, and Bottas has never tried to dodge them. He has answered variations of the same question in press conference after press conference this year, about when the results might turn, about whether a team in its first season can realistically expect more, about how much longer a 37 year old keeps doing this without a podium to show for it.
What the bike ride offers him is not an escape from those questions so much as a buffer against letting them define the whole week. A driver who spends his days off still chasing lap times in his head rarely has anywhere to put a bad result except back into the next race weekend, where the pressure only compounds. Bottas has built an entirely separate measure of success for himself, one with its own distances, its own climbs, and its own finish line in Singapore, and no amount of Cadillac’s early struggles can touch what he accomplishes on a bike before he ever puts a helmet back on for Formula 1. Reporters in Singapore will still ask him about points, about Cadillac’s rookie struggles, about whether a 37 year old on a new team can still find speed the car is not giving him. Bottas will answer those questions fresh off 350 kilometers of gravel, legs tired in a way that has nothing to do with a steering wheel, and at least one part of his week already won.
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