Valtteri Bottas has never exactly been short on personality, but this was still a wonderfully strange flex even by Formula 1 standards. In the latest collaboration with Average Rob, Bottas opened the doors to his Finnish home for the first time on a public platform and revealed the sort of private world most drivers would keep well out of sight: sauna sessions, Finnish drinks, food tasting, a lake bath and, naturally, a 2014 Williams F1 car parked indoors.
That alone tells you everything about the man and the setting. This was not a polished celebrity property tour designed to look elegant and untouchable. It was Bottas showing off the environment that means something to him, and doing it with enough confidence to make the whole thing feel completely normal. For everyone else, of course, it is anything but normal to have a Formula 1 car sitting inside the house.
A home tour with proper Bottas energy
The visit worked because it was more than just a novelty reveal. Average Rob had already taken Bottas around Belgium a year ago, so this was the natural follow-up: Bottas returning the favour by showing them Finland, his culture and, crucially, his own home. That makes the indoor car less of a random stunt and more of a statement. This is a driver who clearly understands the value of his own story, and who is willing to share it on his terms.
The car itself carries real weight in Bottas’s career history. The FW36 Chassis 03 was gifted to him by the team in 2014, the same year he scored his first podium and finished third behind Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton in the Austrian GP. That gives the machine a proper sense of significance. It is not just a souvenir sitting in a garage. It is a physical reminder of the moment Bottas broke through at the highest level.
And then there is the other trophy-level detail. Bottas also pointed out that the Australian GP trophy he won in 2019 is his favourite, which feels entirely fitting for a driver who has always mixed dry humour with a very clear sense of what matters to him. Even the little exchanges had that tone, from Bottas joking, “Valtteri, I am going to miss you in the shower,” to Lewis Hamilton’s old tribute: “My friend Valtteri, the greatest teammate ever.”
That is the broader appeal of the whole thing. It gave fans a rare, personal look at Valtteri Bottas away from the cockpit, but without sanding off the edges that make him interesting in the first place. The result was part home tour, part culture lesson and part reminder that Bottas has always been one of Formula 1’s most distinctive characters. A driver with a car in his house, a story behind every trophy and absolutely no interest in pretending life should look ordinary.
