Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas will swap chassis for this weekend’s French Grand Prix, in a move the Finn says was pre-planned.
Hamilton will run chassis #4 this weekend, the same chassis Bottas ran in Azerbaijan last time out. Whilst Bottas will use chassis #6.
Speaking about the swap, Bottas insisted it wasn’t a result of his performance in Baku, where he languished towards the back of the field having struggled with his tyres all weekend.
“It’s not a new chassis,” explained the 31-year-old. “It’s different and it was always planned for me to change to a different chassis at this point.”
This is Bottas’ third chassis change of the season after his first was heavily damaged in a collision with Williams’ George Russell during the race at Imola.
Bottas is hopeful of putting a handful of bad race weekends behind him after he was due a strong result in Monaco prior to a wheel nut issue, forcing him to retire, followed by tyre problems in Baku. But reckons a return to a more ‘normal’ track this weekend will aid him and Mercedes.
“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.
“I think our car is quite on a knife-edge on those kind 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 and that it’s not that easy to to go into the wrong direction.”
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