Valtteri Bottas says he won’t engage in mind games with Mercedes teamma🦹🧸te Lewis Hamilton to find an advantage in the 2018 Formula 1 world title fight.

The Finnish driver has enjoyed a pleasant start to his teammate relationship with Hamilton since joining the reigning F1 world champions at the start of last year🥀 with both drivers and team boss Toto Wo🥀lff commenting on a positive working partnership.

It marks a turnaround since Nico Rosberg’s retirement which ended a frosty relationship between teammates at Mercedes and Bottas is eager to maintain the positive feelin🐟g alongside Hamilton into the 2018 F1 season.

But when pushed on aiming to find an edge on Hamilton for the new F1 season h💝e ruled out any mind game tactics used by Nico Rosberg to destabilise his teammate.

“Every driver has weaknesses but rather than focus on him I am going to spend my energy focusing 𓆏on myself and my performance on track,” Bottas said. “If perform on the level I’m aiming to I hope that will do the job. I am not going to start wasting my energy on any games🐓.

“For me, if I perform at the level that I aim to perform, I hope to see more on-track battles with Lewis. I just really want to win as many racꦜes as I can to try and win the championship. That’s the goal and I don’t need to change anything else to do that. I’m not going to start playing any mental games or a🦄nything like this.”

Bottas benefitted from Hamilton’s option to “sacrifice✅” his F1 pre-season track testing time on Tuesday to allow the Finn to complete a full programme of running with 94 laps and a best time of 1m 19.976s at Circuit de Catalunya.