Report: Ferrari leaning toward keeping Riccardo Adami as Hamilton’s race engineer for 2026
Lewis Hamilton’s first season in red never really settled. The radio snippets were awkward, the results thin, and every Sunday felt like an exercise in recalibration. Now, with 2026 looming and Ferrari’s own leadership publicly “evaluating all options,” the noise around his pit wall looks set to quieten down — for now.
Multiple Italian reports suggest Riccardo Adami is likely to remain on Hamilton’s side of the Ferrari garage next season after what’s been described as a constructive off‑track reset between the pair. That tracks with the pragmatic mood at Maranello: change for change’s sake is out; continuity ahead of the biggest rules overhaul in a decade is in.
This comes after both Hamilton and team boss Fred Vasseur left the door open to a reshuffle when asked late in 2025. Vasseur offered the classic team principal line — everything on the table, nothing confirmed — while Hamilton made it clear he’d be reviewing his “personal team” and wider processes over the winter. That was read as pressure. It may well have been. But it also sounded like an admission that the learning curve of swapping a 12‑year Mercedes comfort zone for Ferrari’s very different operating style was far steeper than anyone wanted to admit publicly.
Adami, of course, isn’t new to the high-wire act. He’s worked with Sebastian Vettel and Carlos Sainz at Ferrari, and his engineering lineage at the team runs deep. But engineer-driver relationships aren’t plug-and-play. Styles clash, language shifts matter, and when a season tilts away early, the radio becomes a billboard for the strain. In 2025, it too often did.
Ferrari insists the outside view is harsher than the reality. Matteo Togninalli, the team’s head of track engineering, was bullish late last year about the foundations being laid with Hamilton despite the rough optics. The message: after a decade in one system, 10 months in a new one won’t look pretty — and you can’t fake the shorthand that only time (and decent results) will bring. That’s credible. It’s also a reminder that podiums paper over a lot of intangibles.
Keeping Adami would be a bet on stability at a time when Ferrari really can’t afford turbulence. The 2026 regulations will upend the competitive order again, with a radically different aero-philosophy around ground-effect limits and a power unit split that emphasizes electrical deployment. Within that, the way a driver and engineer communicate — how they triage, how quickly they converge on setup direction, how they sift through the new‑era complexity — matters even more.
Ferrari has already signposted some of its 2026 direction. The car, codenamed Project 678, will be unveiled on January 23, three days before Barcelona’s private pre‑season running. Expect a pushrod rear suspension to appear on a Scuderia chassis for the first time since 2010, a notable shift in platform thinking that should dovetail with the new regulatory window. Red Bull is tipped to follow a similar pushrod‑pushrod path on its RB22. It’s a reminder that the suspension layout isn’t just a bullet point in a press kit; it defines how the car sits on its tyres and how forgiving it is to drive — the sort of traits Hamilton, even now, can translate into lap time when the window is open.
There’s also the human dimension. Hamilton’s arrival gave Ferrari a jolt of expectation that the 2025 package never quite met. Charles Leclerc remained the reference on too many weekends, and the Hamilton-Adami channel often sounded out of sync in the heat of battle. Still, the idea of ripping up the GP‑to‑driver pipeline 12 months into a partnership — with new rules around the corner — carries its own risk. If there’s a reset to make, do it in December, agree the language, and live with it.
None of this is to say Hamilton won’t tweak the support cast around him. He’s hinted at optimising travel and timing, sharpening the edges that dulled across a punishing calendar. But Ferrari’s bigger play is obvious: give him a car with a wider operating window and fewer setup dead-ends. When that happens, communication magically improves. Funny how that works.
So, does Adami stay? The paddock mood suggests yes, unless something left-field emerges. That would square with Ferrari’s broader strategy under Vasseur — incremental, targeted changes rather than scorched earth. If the personal chemistry keeps trending up and Project 678 lands in a workable place early, 2026 could look very different on the radio and on the scoreboard.
One last point worth remembering as the headlines roll: the Hamilton-Ferrari marriage was never going to be an instant postcard. You don’t spend over a decade shaping one team around you and then slip seamlessly into another, especially one as idiosyncratic as Ferrari. The awkwardness of 2025 was, in a way, the tax. Whether Adami is the right co-pilot for the next chapter will be decided where it always is — on the stopwatch, not on the scanner.
