Valtteri Bottas believes has vowed to continue pushing for the Formula 1 title but also acknowledged he would accept Mercedes introducing team orders if that directive came.

The Finn had a difficult Belgian Grand Prix on Sunday, dropping two places after a Safety Car period to finish fifth and, as a result, fall 41 points behind championship leader Sebastian Vettel and 34 behind teammate Lewis Hamilton.

The recently turned 28-year-old, who claimed his first half of the year had been "average" joining Mercedes at the beginning of the year, insists he can still have a say in the championship conversation.

"I don't know, I think it depends a lot on me, also,” he said. “If I manage to perform well if I manage to get pole position and escape in the races, then it's in my hands as well, if I perform well. There are still eight races to go, there's a good amount of points for grabs.”

Bottas did concede, however, that he was starting to become reliant on some help from those ahead to maintain his chances and, therefore, would be prepared to back Hamilton's title bid towards the end of the year.

"The guys that are ahead of me in the championship, they may get some DNFs hopefully -- hopefully not for us, but it can happen, but I don't think that way,” he claimed. “I don't let those negative things come to my mind.

“For sure at some point, I'll understand if the team wants to really go for the championship to make sure, at least, that one of their guys wins it, but it's a bit early and we're still going race by race. Different races bring different situations, so we'll see."

Reflecting on the events at Spa, where he passed by both Daniel Ricciardo and Kimi Raikkonen at a Safety Car restart, he believes luck with the tyre situation played a major role and ultimately led to what happened.

"It's always difficult to predict this kind of things, like the Safety Car and then we only had one new set of Softs,” he said.

“For sure, if there was an extra set of fresh Ultrasofts it would have been better but in these conditions, I think we've made the right choices, our car was really good on the soft tyre but it's easy to say afterwards that in normal circumstances we could have done differently.

"We were just a little bit unlucky, at the end of the day, with the Safety Car. For sure, looking back, it would have been better to have fresh Ultrasofts available for the restart but it's a bit too late now because the tyre choices are made two months before the start of the Grand Prix...''