Valtteri Bottas claims 2019 feels like a “fresh start” at Mercedes with new right-hand men at his side.
The Finn will have both a new race engineer in Riccardo Musconi in his ear and a new performance engineer as he looks to move forward from the troubles of last year.
Musconi’s promotion comes as Bottas’ former race engineer Tony Ross moves across to the Formula E project within the Mercedes motorsport program.
“There’s always a little bit of work to start a new driver-engineer relationship and I’ve actually also have a new performance engineer too, so it feels like a bit of a fresh start for the season,” he explained to Crash.net.
“We’ve only got to know each other better right at the end of last year, but I think it has been pretty good. Sometimes changes can be good, we started from a clean, fresh page.
Also Read:
- Bottas no longer willing to be Hamilton’s ‘wingman’ at Mercedes
- Bottas: Mercedes need to ‘unlock’ the W10 to match Ferrari
“All the meetings we’ve had in December and January, about my performance, what can we do better during the race weekends, my weaknesses, my strengths, it has been quite nice to work with two new people and even in testing it has been enjoyable,” Bottas added.
“Obviously we’re still getting to know each other better and when it will come to setting the car up with limited time during the race weekends, we’ll see how we can do that. But, so far so good.”
The 29-year-old heads into 2019 needing to improve having failed to win a race in 2018 and now has the presence of reserve driver Esteban Ocon, who is tipped to replace Bottas next season.
