The race is on, and Valtari Bottas's long anticipated departure from Mercedes at the end of the season is now official.

But what should we expect from him in his new team, Alpha Romeo, and was the decision to drop him correct?

I'm Ed Straw, and joining me to discuss the latest

moves in the F1 driver market is Gary Anderson. Well Gary, I'm sure you're absolutely shocked

by the news of Botaster Alpha. It's nice at least when it's confirmed and we can talk about it

as a certainty rather than a hypothetical, isn't yeah it is really i mean obviously it's been

no big surprise something's been going to happen there um up until sort of the last couple of weeks

we weren't really all for me i didn't seem to really be the team that was going to happen for it

might have gone to williams but um obviously it's it's all been signed done and dust it now so

you know it's one of those sort of things. There's not that many good

drives around. Unfortunately, you know, the good teams have got drivers. And for Valtrey, it's a, it's a

sad end to a Mercedes career that could have turned into so much better. But, you know, at the end

of the day, it didn't. And that's the facts. There is the same amount of races every year for each driver out there, and it's about

performing, and, you know, the performance wasn't there, really, and consistency of performance

wasn't there, so, yeah, sad, sad day for him, but, you know, unfortunately, it's happened.

Yeah, it was going to come eventually, I guess, but it must be hard to take after five seasons in the top team. But I guess mentioning that decision from Mercedes, you can't really blame them, can you? Valtreibot has done a good job for that team, and we've talked on podcasts before about how the quality of the job he's doing shouldn't be underestimated just

because you're not as good as Lewis Hamilton doesn't mean you're not a very, very good

driver. But I think in the circumstances with Lewis Hamilton, obviously closer to the end

of his career than the start, they need to look towards the future as well, don't they?

So Lewis Hamilton's still there, the man. He's still the driver. But it was time to bring Russell in, wasn't it? Yeah, it's definitely time to bring Russell and they've got to protect the future. There's been a couple of dodgy re-contracts with Hamilton that might, you know, might have gone different directions if he got the hump and went the different way and just decided it had enough.

And they would have been left in the lurch a bit because, you know, we say Valtrey did a good job.

When he came in, I actually thought he would do a much better job.

...