Ferrari’s decision to split Lewis Hamilton and Riccardo Adami after just one season always felt like the start of a bigger reshuffle rather than a clean, instant fix. Now the next move appears to be taking shape: former McLaren performance engineer Cedric Michel-Grosjean has been linked with the job of becoming Hamilton’s race engineer for 2026.
Nothing is confirmed publicly and Ferrari isn’t saying a word, but the direction of travel is clear enough. After 24 races of increasingly strained radio exchanges last year — the kind that go beyond the occasional bad timing and into the territory of fundamental working rhythm — Ferrari has prioritised removing friction from Hamilton’s side of the garage as it heads into a regulation reset.
Adami has already been reassigned internally, ending a partnership that never sounded comfortable. The flashpoints were varied: barbed comments, long silences, those now-infamous on-air digs about “tea breaks”, and recurring tension around managing traffic and racecraft against rivals. In modern F1, where the driver-engineer relationship is half engineering interface and half psychological scaffolding, that sort of dynamic doesn’t get better by simply hoping it settles down.
So Ferrari is effectively running a transitional phase through pre-season.
It’s understood that for the first running in Barcelona — a behind-closed-doors test where teams can run for three of the five scheduled days — Hamilton will be “covered” by Charles Leclerc’s race engineer, Bryan Bozzi. That’s a pragmatic stopgap rather than a statement of intent, and it underlines the urgency: Ferrari needs Hamilton dialled into the SF-26’s language quickly, not spending valuable early mileage translating between different communication styles.
From there, Italian reports claim the baton could pass to Carlo Santi for the two Bahrain tests. Santi is best known in this context as Kimi Räikkönen’s former race engineer — a name that carries weight in Maranello because it speaks to calm under pressure and the ability to operate with a world champion who doesn’t do things by the book, or by anyone else’s schedule.
But the more intriguing part is the suggestion that Santi’s role would be temporary, “waiting for a new figure” — and that the longer-term hire is expected to arrive from McLaren.
That’s where Michel-Grosjean comes in.
He was a lead trackside performance engineer on Oscar Piastri’s McLaren last season and is reported to have left the team at the end of the year. Performance engineers don’t always become race engineers, but the skillset Ferrari is seemingly targeting makes sense: someone deeply fluent in extracting lap time from tyres, energy deployment and balance trends, and capable of converting dense technical information into a conversation a driver can use at 300km/h.
Hamilton doesn’t need hand-holding. What he needs — especially at this stage of his career and with Ferrari trying to build a title-capable programme around a new car — is clarity. The best driver-engineer pairings all share the same trait: when the pressure spikes, the radio gets simpler, not messier. If Ferrari believes a McLaren-bred performance mind can bring that discipline, it’s an entirely rational bet.
There’s also a political dimension here that Ferrari will be keen to manage quietly. Bozzi stepping in, even briefly, inevitably drags Leclerc’s side of the garage into Hamilton’s orbit. That’s fine for a day of running; it’s not a sustainable long-term arrangement if Ferrari wants two cleanly separated operations, each with its own identity. Bringing in an external hire avoids awkward internal jostling and helps reset the tone after a year when Hamilton’s communications were scrutinised as much as his lap times.
The little details add to the paddock chatter. Michel-Grosjean has been active on LinkedIn, and he recently liked a post from Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur discussing the SF-26’s journey. That isn’t proof of anything — people like posts for all sorts of reasons — but it’s exactly the sort of breadcrumb that keeps tongues wagging during winter months when teams are at their most secretive.
For Hamilton, the bigger point is that Ferrari appears to be treating this as more than a personality mismatch. Splitting him from Adami is one step. Rebuilding the interface around him — through testing, through procedures, through a new voice in his ear — is the real work. And with 2026 bringing fresh technical demands and a new competitive landscape, Ferrari can’t afford a slow start caused by internal noise.
Whether Michel-Grosjean is the final piece or simply the latest name in the mix, Ferrari’s intent is unmistakable: Hamilton’s second year in red is going to be set up differently. The team has made its call on what didn’t work. Now it has to prove it can build something that does.
