Toto Wolff has revealed that a late misfire ℱon Valtteri Bottas’ Formula 1 engine gave Mercedes “a bit of a headache” during the closing sta🌼ges of the French Grand Prix.

Bottas trailed teammate Lewis Hamilton by nearly 20 seconds as 🗹he fended off a late attack from Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc to claim second place at Paul Ricard.

The Finn had already dropped some time after being caught out by a short Virtual Safety Car period, before a late power unit gremlin cropped up with only a handful of laps remaining, enabling Leclerc to clos💞e in.

“We had a ✅little misfire on Valtteri’s engine that caused a little bit of a headache,” Wolff🌺 explained.

“It set in pretty late. I think it was probably six or seven laps to the end. We tried to manage it, which🥀 was successful and was under control then.”

Despite wha💫t looked on paper to be a comfortable Mercedes one-two, the team had to manage a number of issues on both cars throughout the race, including a seat problem for Hamilton and tyre graining.

“Often when you look at it from a TV perspective, it doesn’t really tell all the little dramas that happen behind,” 🌌Wolff said.

“We need to see what happened on the seat, but we were trying to manage the car in the right way to avoid all the troubles and at a certain stage we had some very shallow blistering on the tyres - which wasn’t a worry, but it was very interesting to see.

“But overall I’m really happy with the team’s performance this weꦜekend, I thi🥃nk it was probably our strongest showing so far this season.”