Valtteri Bottas says it is “not rocket science” to adapt from Mercedes to Ferrari machinery despite Lewis Hamilton’s struggles in F1 2025.
Hamilton made only the second team switch of his illustrious career when he swapped Mercedes for Ferrari at the end of 2024.
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Yet despite enjoying success in the sprint format, winning the mini race from pole position in China and finishing third in Miami, the seven-time World Champion has largely struggled so far this season, lagging behind team-mate Charles Leclerc on pace.
Having been powered by Mercedes engines throughout his F1 career, the vagaries of the Ferrari power unit have been cited as a potential factor behind his woes.
Hamilton is also understood to have struggled with Ferrari’s Brembo brakes, having grown accustomed to using braking materials provided by rival brand Carbon Industrie across his 12 seasons with Mercedes.
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Bottas spent five years as Hamilton’s Mercedes team-mate between 2017 and 2021, helping the British driver to four consecutive Drivers’ titles.
The Finnish driver swapped Mercedes for Ferrari power at the start of 2022 when he joined long-serving Ferrari customers Sauber (then competing as Alfa Romeo).
Appearing on the Red Flags podcast, Bottas downplayed the challenge of adjusting from Mercedes to Ferrari machinery, revealing that he found the change “quite straightforward.”
Yet he cautioned that the big rule changes for 2022, which saw F1 revert to ground-effect cars, potentially eased his adaptation compared to Hamilton, who has made the move to Ferrari during an existing rules cycle.
Bottas said: “For sure, there’s things to learn, things to get used to.
“And especially if you are with a team-mate that has got used to all that, he will have the upper hand initially, but racing drivers always need to be adaptive.
“You need to be able to adapt to a new car. Pretty much every year there’s a new car anyway – power units will change and so on.
“So it’s nothing unusual in F1 that you’re always adapting, always learning because this sport just keeps developing.
“But I know what he’s probably been going through and for me, personally, it was quite straightforward.
“But we must remember that at that time when I joined Alfa Romeo, there was the big regulation change so there were many new things anyway already.”
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Asked specifically about the differences between the Mercedes and Ferrari engines, Bottas explained: “The driveability is a bit different. How the power comes, especially at the lower revs.
“But which one is better? It’s difficult to say.
“The settings, the power harvesting, power deployment, you’ve got different strategies.
“They call them differently, so you need to learn how to use that.
“Even the harvesting, the braking can be a bit different because of that. [The sound] can be different, but that doesn’t really make a big difference.
“That’s it really. It’s not rocket science.”
On the challenge of moving from Carbon Industrie to Brembo brakes, he added: “For me, it didn’t make a difference.
“Obviously, Mercedes uses CI. Sauber used Brembo, which is what Ferrari used.
“The only small difference for me was how the brakes warm up. Another brand warms up quicker, but for me the behaviour was same same.”
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