Ferrari isn’t treating Lewis Hamilton’s Barcelona breakthrough as a one-off, and the clearest sign of that is happening on the radio.
Despite Carlo Santi being drafted in as an initial stopgap ahead of the 2026 season, the team has no intention of rotating Hamilton’s race engineer again in the wake of the Spanish Grand Prix – the weekend that delivered Hamilton’s first win in red and nudged his title bid back into shape.
Hamilton’s victory at Barcelona – and the way it was managed – has effectively settled an internal question Ferrari had been willing to leave open. Santi, 52, was meant to be the temporary voice in Hamilton’s ear while the wider engineering structure bedded in. Ferrari had also signed former McLaren engineer Cedric Michel-Grosjean, who was widely viewed as the longer-term solution. Instead, the immediate chemistry between Hamilton and Santi has turned a short-term patch into something far more solid.
That matters at Ferrari, where “small” operational details have a habit of becoming structural problems if they’re allowed to fester. The team lived that in 2025, when Hamilton’s first season was repeatedly punctuated by brittle radio exchanges with then race engineer Riccardo Adami. There were moments that sounded trivial in isolation, but the underlying theme was familiar: a driver and an engineer not quite speaking the same language on Sundays, and not quite trusting the same priorities when the pressure came on.
Adami has since been moved into a different role, heading Ferrari’s Driver Academy. Santi stepped up to fill the seat on race weekends. Four podiums in seven Grands Prix later – and now a win – Ferrari’s thinking has hardened into a plan: don’t break what’s finally working.
Barcelona was the proof-of-concept. Strategy calls didn’t feel laboured, the tone on the radio sounded settled, and Hamilton looked like a driver who wasn’t spending half his mental bandwidth translating. In a season where the margins are defined by how cleanly a team executes the boring stuff, that’s a competitive advantage in itself.
Hamilton has framed it in more human terms. He’s been open about how long it takes for an engineer to interpret feedback properly – not just “it’s understeery”, but where, when, and why; entry versus mid-corner versus exit; the compromises you’ll accept and the ones you won’t. It’s not romantic, but it’s where lap time lives.
“I think catering to a driver’s needs takes time to learn,” Hamilton said. “When you’re giving an engineer feedback, they’re understanding through corner balance, they’re understanding all the elements that contribute to the struggles of driving.
“You try to describe what it is, the problem you have, corner by corner, entry, middle, exit… Having that driver-engineer collab, it’s hit and miss sometimes.
“I do feel like Carlo is like my Italian Bono.”
The “Bono” reference carries weight because Hamilton doesn’t hand out that kind of comparison lightly. Peter Bonnington was the constant through Hamilton’s Mercedes era, the calm voice behind six titles between 2014 and 2020. For Hamilton to say he’s found an equivalent at Ferrari is less about sentiment and more about what he believes is required to win championships again: clarity under stress, and a relationship that reduces noise rather than adds to it.
There was also a revealing moment after the chequered flag. Santi joined Hamilton on the podium in Barcelona – a deliberate gesture in a sport where those invitations are rarely accidental. Hamilton described Santi as “very, very quiet”, someone who doesn’t naturally broadcast emotion. Hamilton, by contrast, is demonstrative when a wall comes down between him and his crew, and he admitted he’d been physically pulling Santi in, hugging him, saying thank you.
“Yeah, it was great to have him up there,” Hamilton said. “We didn’t know each other, we’d never spoken and I didn’t really know much of… I didn’t know anything about him. And we met and I think got on straight away.
“It’s really great to be able to share that experience with him on that stage… I like to think that this has probably reignited the love that he has as being an engineer as he has done for me as a driver.”
That last line is Hamilton in full optimiser mode: if he feels better, he wants the people around him feeling better too, because he’s seen what happens when a high-performance group starts tightening up.
The timing of Ferrari finding this rhythm couldn’t be much better for Hamilton’s season. The Barcelona win lifted him to second in the championship and trimmed the deficit to leader Kimi Antonelli to 41 points. Antonelli’s race ended early with what appeared to be another Mercedes battery problem, a reminder that the new era can still bite hard on reliability.
It’s still a sizeable gap, but it’s no longer the kind of gap that requires miracles. It requires momentum, clean Sundays, and a Ferrari operation that doesn’t wobble when the next knife-edge call arrives. Keeping Santi in place is a quietly significant part of that: not because the engineer is suddenly a headline act, but because stable communication is the platform every other decision is built on.
Ferrari has spent years talking about “execution”. Barcelona looked like it. Now the real test is whether they resist the temptation to keep tinkering the moment something else looks shiny. For Hamilton, at least, the message is clear: he’s found a voice he trusts. And Ferrari would be wise not to turn the volume down.
