Mercedes swapped chassis between Hamilton and teammate Valtteri Bottas heading into the weekend to help balance out mileage between the two cars, but suspicions were raise༺d about the change given Hamilton’s struggles to match Bottas throughout the three practice sessions.

The seve🍌n-time world champion recovered strongly in qualifying as he secured a spot on the front-row of the grid, two-tenths down on Max Verstappen’🍌s stunning benchmark and one position ahead of Bottas.

Speaking to Sky presenter and ex-F1 driver Paul di Resta in the post-qualifying interviews in parc ferme, Hamilton said:ཧ “I saw you coming up with some myth and so I was happy to be able to prove it wrong.

“The 🐲quality of our engineers work', all the cars are exactly the same.”

Expanding on the chas🌠sis change later in the FIA press conference, Hamilton added: “It’s basically the same cockpit with your own ꧒settings.

“Both the cars are built around us, so normally you are not supposed to feel any diff💧erence. Of course, we made changes and it’s been a difficult weekend, and of course you start to wonder at some stage whether there are any differenꦐces, but look at that result.

“We just got a great result today and that just shows that i🧸ts all the same. It’s normal that🦩 we rotate, we do that anyways.”

Hamilton admitted it༒ had been a “really hard weekend mentally” after his early pace struggles, revealing a number of changes were key to his qualifying turnaround.

“You wouldn’t believe how many changes I’ve made since practi🌌ce one,” heꦿ explained.

“Going round and round, chasing the tail, ending up coming back to something similar to where we started. Generally, I’ve been unhappy in the car all week💞end.

"Congratulations to Max, he did a great job today,” Hamilton added. "They’ve been incredibly quick. You 🌠see they have a new engine for this weekend, not a new spec or a💧nything as far I am aware.

“They’re quick down the straights. I think it was a lot of time down the straights today. We’ve got a race on our ha🌟nds and we’re loving the battle. We are going to keep pushing, keep fighting and giving it everything.”