Verstappen holds a five-point advantage over main rival Hamilton in the championship but will start Sunday’s race from last after Red Bull fitted a new Honda engine in his car, triggering an automatic grid penalty for exceeding his permitted allocation of🗹 power unit components for the season.

And Hamilton knows Verstappen’s back-of-the-gri⛎d start has opened the door for Mercedes to take advantage at a venue it is unbeaten at since Sochi joined the F1 calendar in 2014.

“It doesn’t really change anything for us,” Hamilton said. “We just have to do our th🧸ing and focus on movi💯ng forward.

ꦆ“It’s a tough year for everyone with reliability, so it’s definitely a shame for himꦚ. But we have to try and capitalise on that naturally and try to get maximum result.

“A one-two would be spectacular for us as a ♑team.”

Hamilton was outpaced by Mercedes teammate Va﷽ltteri Bottas in both practice sessions on Friday but managed to reduce his deficit from two-tenths of a second in FP1 to just 0.044s in FP2.

Despiಞte ending up closer to Bottas in the afternoon, Hamilton said he felt more comfortable in the op🎀ening session.

“It seems like we star🍷ted off on the right foot,” Hamilton said. “We’re always trying to progress.

“The first run in the first session was the ⛄best, and we’ve been migrating and adjusting since and it’s not been as good as that one as you start to push more and more, I guess.

“But it was ge💞nerally a good session pace wise, we’ve got some work to do probably on our long run and then tomorrow it’s going to be raining a lot we heard.

“So, it’s going to be a big wet day tomorrow. It’ll be interesting to see what we ꦆdo in terms of set-🅷up for that, knowing that potentially Sunday is dry.”

Hamilton revealed that Mercedes expe🎶rimented 🍬by running two different set-ups on its cars throughout Friday.

“Me and Valtt♛eri  are quite different on ꧂set-up, deliberately going in different ways to try and see what is best,” he explained.

“So toni﷽ght, we will try and understand, study those and figure out how ꧑we come back to the right path.

“It’s an OK track for me,” Hamilton added. "It🌞’s not my best, it’s not my worst. But there is definitely things I can pinpoint from the data.

“It’s more with set-up mostly, I would say, and probably a ✤little bit in the 🎐driving. So I’ll work on it tonight.”