I think Mercedes are perfectly fine with Bottas and Hamilton as a pairing to be honest. Toto talked about it in Beyond the grid, how much easier it is to work in that environment compared to when Rosberg was there and things went south.
Mercedes have two competetive goals each season: Win the driver's championship and the constructor's championship. With Bottas being a perfect number two, that pushes Lewis without over-doing it, they're in a perfect spot to do so.
Idk, I feel like the writing has been on the wall for a while now with Russell knocking on the door. If Mercedes really liked the Hamilton/Bottas combo, surely they would've given Valtteri more term at some point, right? Every year just 1 year extension.. that doesn't exactly instill confidence.
Bottas isn't doing any favours to himself on the track either. Bahrain the team screwed up his pitstop, but he would've still been miles behind Hamilton/Verstappen. Imola he was stuck in traffic, didn't show a killer instict of getting past slower cars, and was involved in a clumsy crash with a fellow Mercedes driver. Portugal just bad race pace, had Perez not screwed up the start Bottas would've probably been under pressure from him too.
I get that he's racing arguably the greatest driver of all time, but Bottas has now driven 81 races across 5 seasons on the consistently best car on the grid and out of those 81 races he's won nine. In that same time frame Hamilton has won 44 races, Verstappen 10 and Vettel 11.
