Ferrari reshuffles Riccardo Adami as Hamilton gets a new voice for 2026
Ferrari has moved Riccardo Adami into a fresh role ahead of 2026, clearing the decks for Lewis Hamilton to work with a new race engineer in his second season at Maranello.
Adami, who partnered Hamilton through a scratchy 2025 campaign, will now split his time between Ferrari’s junior driver programme and overseeing Testing of Previous Cars. The team says Hamilton’s new race engineer will be named in due course, and pointedly hasn’t ruled out either an internal step-up or an external hire.
It’s a change that feels both unsurprising and significant. Hamilton’s first year in red was peppered with awkward radio moments that suggested driver and engineer never quite found the same wavelength. Miami was the most pointed, Hamilton bristling at the pit wall over team orders and quipping about taking a “tea break” while the calls came late. In Monaco, the seven-time champion crossed the line and asked if Adami was “upset with me.” Not exactly Rosso harmony.
The timing also puts Martin Brundle’s mid-season read back under the spotlight. The Sky F1 pundit said Hamilton “missed terribly” the steady hand he had for years at Mercedes, a subtle nod to the deep, almost telepathic rapport between Hamilton and Peter Bonnington. That partnership was the gold standard in the hybrid era; they didn’t just swap information, they finished each other’s sentences at 300 km/h.
As reported last year, a no‑poaching clause in Hamilton’s Mercedes exit limited any direct wooing of former colleagues for 2025. Bonnington stayed put in Brackley and continues as race engineer to Kimi Antonelli, having stepped up to head of race engineering in 2024. The point is less the job titles and more the contrast: Max Verstappen and Gianpiero Lambiase are the current benchmark for how driver and engineer can operate with total trust and instant translation.
“They know how each other thinks,” Brundle said on Sky. “GP Lambiase translates what Max wants… I think that’s what Lewis has missed terribly going to Ferrari – somebody who understands what they’re saying, what they need, all the little nuances. And a bit like Ross Brawn and Michael Schumacher were able to do, GP and the strategists tell Max: ‘Go fast, go slow.’ Whatever they need Max to do, they know he will deliver it flawlessly.”
Hamilton hasn’t exactly hidden from the topic. In Abu Dhabi at the end of last season, he talked candidly about auditing his entire operation over the winter, both inside Ferrari and in his own camp. “We just need to analyse where we’ve been, what’s been good, areas that we can improve on,” he said. “I’ve highlighted, and I know where they all are… I’ll look internally at my personal team, away from the track, and see what we can do to be more efficient with the timing and traveling. I’ll do the same with the team.”
Then came the 41st birthday post, a subtle-but-not-that-subtle marker: “The time for change is now. Starting new routines, leaving behind unwanted patterns and working on growth. Let go of things that don’t serve you.”
Ferrari’s choice of who takes the headset next matters, and not just for optics. The race engineer is a driver’s translator, therapist, strategist and metronome rolled into one. Get that relationship right and you cut through noise, compress decisions, and catch the race as it happens instead of reacting a lap too late. Get it wrong and you end up second-guessing each other with 19 corners to navigate and a wall three feet from your right mirror.
On the Scuderia side, moving Adami into development and TPC work is hardly a demotion. It’s a strategic deployment of experience in an area that Ferrari values, with juniors to mentor and a bank of old machinery to run for correlation and training. But it’s also a tacit acceptance that Hamilton’s second year requires a different voice on Sundays.
The wider context is impossible to ignore. 2026 is a reset year, and Hamilton will want to hit the ground running after a bedding-in season at Ferrari. The partnership didn’t lack speed at times in 2025, but the edges were rough. With Charles Leclerc established on the other side of the garage and the competitive order tightening, those rough edges matter.
Ferrari isn’t rushing the announcement, which suggests they’re weighing more than a simple plug-and-play. Do they elevate a known quantity from within, someone who already speaks Ferrari? Or bring in a fresh set of eyes and cadence to mesh with Hamilton’s style? Either route carries risk. Either could be the making of this project.
What’s clear is the intent. Hamilton asked for change. Ferrari has started making it. The next voice in his ear will tell us how serious both are about turning a high-profile marriage into a title-calibre operation.
