Lewis Hamilton: Engineer switch “certainly didn’t help” start of 2019 season

Lewis Hamilton has said that the internal switch at Mercedes of engineer Ricciardo Musconi to Valtteri Bottas’ side of the garage “certainly didn’t help” his start to the 2019 Formula 1 season.

Before the start of the season last year Musconi was promoted to become Bottas’ primary race engineer after the departure of Tony Ross to Mercedes’ Formula E team.
 
While Hamilton went on to win a sixth World Championship he felt Musconi’s departure was a hard one to take after building a good relationship within his engineer team.
 
“It certainly didn’t help,” he told Auto Motor und Sport.

“You have to work hard to build a relationship of trust with your engineers, and with Bono and the other engineers we have grown into a really good team.

“Ricky is a very talented engineer so it’s obvious that he wants to go places, and there was an opportunity on the other car. But I must have gotten more out of him than he realised, and vice versa.”

Bottas won two of the first four races, including the opener in Melbourne, with many dubbing the Finn as Bottas 2.0, something Hamilton feels Musconi helped achieve, admitting it led him to change his driving.

“If he suddenly works on the other car, he’ll say ‘Listen Valtteri, we did it this way and that way with Lewis’. And his team is now doing things very much like mine,” he added.

“So I had to think again about how to go in slightly different directions to get more out. And when you’ve been close to 100 per cent, that’s not easy.

“I’m never quite perfect in the first races because I always try a lot of things with the car.

“Then when there’s talk of Bottas 2.0 and after four races we are tied with two wins each, of course I notice that. I’m only human.”