BARCELONA, Spain -- Valtteri Bottas admits his winter switch from Williams to Mercedes has been "a bigger thing" than he initially expected it to be, though he fully expects it to be a hurdle he can overcome.
Bottas left the team he had spent four years with to replace the retired Nico Rosberg ahead of this campaign. He finished his first week in the team's 2017 challenger, the W08, with the quickest time and most mileage from the opening winter test.
Despite that strong start, Bottas concedes he has been surprise with the scale of the challenge of moving to the world champions.
"I definitively feel more comfortable and more part of the team every day, I already feel good. For example, getting in this morning and having breakfast here it already felt normal, so that's a good feeling. But there's definitively a big difference compared to last week, because this was the first proper time of working as unit, as a team, on track, with the engineers, finding performance, and I learned very much from it every day.
"I still think there's work to do, as changing teams is maybe a slightly bigger thing than I initially thought it would be. But it's not a hurdle than you cannot go over, I think it's definitively something that I can do and I've been working flat out since the announcement to get comfortable with everything."
The Finn, who is yet to win a grand prix in his career, will go alongside three-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, who is currently second on F1's all-time winners' list. Bottas thinks it would be foolish not to learn from his new teammate, especially with such big changes to the 2017 cars.
"He has been part of this team for a long time, he knows exactly how the team works. He did comment after the first time running with the new car that he feels pretty much the same behaviour as the old car - obviously with more grip and feels slightly bigger.
"But I would rather join a new team at this point than, for example, the year before."