WATCH: Valentino Rossi’s lap in Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes F1 car
Go on board with Valentino Rossi as he gets behind the wheel of Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes W08 during a seat swap at Valencia
Footage of Valentino Rossi’s outing in Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes F1 car has been released with a ‘full beans’ on-board lap of the Valencia circuit starring the Italian.
The MotoGP legend swapped seats for the day with six-time Formula 1 World Champion Hamilton in Spain last week, with Rossi getting behind the wheel of a 2017-spec Mercedes W08 as his contemporary lapped on the Yamaha M1.
Though Rossi has developed a fairly substantial repertoire of four-wheel exploits over the years to dovetail his MotoGP commitments in sportcars and rallying, this was his first F1 outing in more than a decade.
Though the fairly tight curves mean Valencia is a rarely used venue for F1 – making reference points trickier than in a MotoGP context – it has been reported that Rossi was around 1.5secs off Hamilton’s benchmark lap.
It certainly looks like he is trying hard…
Hamilton, meanwhile, was around 13secs slower than Fabio Quartararo’s pole-winning Valencia MotoGP time from November.
You can watch that lap here.
Rossi has previously driven F1 cars, perhaps most famously in the mid-2000s when an outing in a current-spec Ferrari F1 car during a group test saw him prove instantly competitive.
