Valtteri Bottas has a new race engineer for this season with Mercedes promoting Riccardo Musconi to the role.
For the past two seasons Bottas has worked with Tony Ross, however, he has made the move over to Mercedes’ Formula E programme meaning a new voice in Bottas’ head.
Musconi previously worked as an engineer on Lewis Hamilton’s side of the garage.
Bottas told Crash.net: “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.
“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.
“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.
“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.”
His team-mate Hamilton will continue to work with long-time senior race engineer Peter Bonnington.
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