“It’s not a new chassis” – Valtteri Bottas will be racing with Lewis Hamilton’s W12 this weekend at Paul Ricard in a bid to recover from his recent poor form.
Mercedes have decided to swap the chassis of their drivers this weekend as they look to recover from two disastrous street races at Monaco and Baku. Valtteri Bottas confirmed this, calling it a pre-planned move to give all chassis – the W12 – similar mileage.
“It’s not a new chassis. It’s different and it was always planned for me to change to a different chassis at this point.”
Mercedes looking for hat-trick of wins at Paul Ricard
Mercedes would be relieved to be racing in a non-street circuit again, after conceding the lead to Red Bull. The latter won both the street races – Max Verstappen at Monaco and Sergio Perez at Baku.
The reigning champions have form on their side at the Paul Ricard Circuit, having won the last two races here. Bottas naturally sounded optimistic, after conceding Baku and Monaco was a struggle for both him and Hamilton.
“We saw that in Monaco, for me, I managed to find the set-up and the confidence and get the tyres to work and Lewis didn’t. It almost felt like vice-versa in Baku.
“There was quite a big difference towards the end of the weekend with the set-up. And now I can say that probably the direction I took, we took as a team, wasn’t ideal. Some other small things combined. I think our car is quite on a knife-edge on those kinds of tracks.
“But I think at least the next few tracks it’s a bit more normal and hopefully we can get a reasonable set-up and that it’s not that easy to go into the wrong direction.”
