Ross Brawn has seen enough driver-team marriages up close to know when the chemistry matters more than the headlines. And as Formula 1 heads into its 2026 reset, he’s convinced Lewis Hamilton can still deliver the sort of season that reminds everyone why he’s been the sport’s reference point for so long — if Ferrari gets the basics right around him.
Speaking at the Autosport Awards, Brawn framed Hamilton’s prospects less as a question of raw speed and more as one of alignment. The move to Maranello last year ended a 12-year stretch at Mercedes and, crucially, the long-running partnership with race engineer Peter “Bono” Bonnington. Ferrari paired Hamilton with Riccardo Adami, a change that was always going to be more than swapping a voice in his ear.
It didn’t work.
From early on, the radio exchanges had an edge to them: Hamilton seeking clarity and control, Adami sounding increasingly resistant to the way those requests were delivered. In a team that lives and dies on tiny margins — and where internal dynamics can swing the mood of a weekend — the friction became its own story. Whatever was happening off-mic, what came through on-mic suggested two people talking past each other at the very moments you need the opposite.
Ferrari has already acted. Adami has been moved into a different role ahead of the new season, and Hamilton will have a new race engineer for 2026. That appointment hasn’t been confirmed publicly yet, but Ferrari is expected to lean on Charles Leclerc’s engineer Bryan Bozzi during the first pre-season shakedown in Barcelona next week, with Bozzi supporting both cars.
That’s a practical stop-gap, but it also underlines the clock Ferrari is now racing. Melbourne on March 8 comes around quickly, and “we’ll sort it later” isn’t a luxury when the entire grid is learning a new generation of cars at the same time. Hamilton doesn’t need perfection on day one, but he does need a working rhythm — a shared shorthand — because that’s where his best weekends have always been built.
Brawn, who spent a decade at Ferrari and understands the peculiar pressure that comes with that job, put it in the simplest terms: it has to gel.
“I think we’d all love for him to be successful,” he said. “I’ve got a special place for Ferrari; I’ve been there 10 years. I know how tough it is there.
“But it’s always a fine line between a team gelling and not quite gelling, and it didn’t quite gel last year.”
The timing is fascinating because 2026 isn’t just another season; it’s a hard reset. F1 is bringing in all-new cars and engines, with active aerodynamics via moveable front and rear wings and a power unit concept built around a 50/50 split between electrical and combustion output. The sporting side adds two driver-deployed tools: an “overtake mode” that replaces DRS and provides extra power under specific conditions, plus a separate “boost” that can be used at any point.
That’s a lot of levers for a driver to pull, and a lot of decision-making to distribute between cockpit and pit wall. It’s also exactly the kind of environment where the Hamilton–engineer relationship stops being background noise and becomes an actual performance differentiator. When the car’s behaviour changes corner-to-corner because of aero modes, and energy deployment becomes a live strategic weapon rather than a pre-scripted routine, the voice on the radio isn’t just relaying information — it’s part of the lap.
Brawn’s bet is that the new ruleset could play to Hamilton’s strengths, not least because it forces everyone into adaptation mode. Hamilton has openly found the ground-effect era a tougher fit, and the numbers reflect that: two wins since the 2022 regulation change, despite his career total sitting at 105 grand prix victories. A new car philosophy gives him a clean sheet, and — if Ferrari gives him a platform he believes in — the motivation tends to look after itself.
“If he gets some incentives and if he sees there’s an opportunity, I think we’ll see a vintage Lewis,” Brawn said. “So I’m hoping that happens.”
It’s telling that even Toto Wolff, now watching from the other side of the fence, has pointed to the same underlying theme: that 2026 will reward drivers who can think their way through the new package as much as they can hustle it.
“There are brand new cars which are completely different to drive. New power units which need an intelligent way of managing the energy,” Wolff said. “Next year is an important one.”
Ferrari’s challenge, then, isn’t to manufacture a fairy-tale narrative — it’s to build a functioning operation around a driver who still has the hunger and the bandwidth to do something special, provided the environment isn’t working against him. The paddock cliché is that confidence is worth tenths. In Hamilton’s case, trust might be worth more: trust in the car’s responses, trust in the plan, and trust that when he asks a question at 320km/h, the answer will be the one he needs, delivered the way he needs it.
Because if Ferrari nails that part — the unglamorous, day-to-day stuff — Brawn’s “vintage” prediction stops sounding like nostalgia and starts sounding like a warning shot.
