Hamilton hints at Ferrari shake-up as engineer dynamic stays under scrutiny
Lewis Hamilton isn’t hiding behind platitudes anymore. On the eve of the Abu Dhabi finale, the seven-time champion made clear Ferrari’s winter to-do list isn’t just about wind tunnels and updates. It’s about people.
“Whether people need to move into different positions to work better,” he said, is on the table when he sits down with Ferrari’s key decision-makers. Coming after a season of radio friction and thin results, his words land with weight.
It all circles back to the most intimate relationship a driver has outside the cockpit: the race engineer. Hamilton arrived in Maranello without Peter Bonnington — his long-time Mercedes lieutenant — due to contractual constraints. Instead he was paired with Riccardo Adami, the experienced voice who previously steered Carlos Sainz. On paper, solid. In practice, it’s been scratchy.
We’ve heard the sharp edges over team radio this year, and seen the body language too. Hamilton has publicly pushed back against the idea of a broken partnership — “Our relationship is great… We don’t have any problems whatsoever,” he said earlier in the season, dismissing the noise as “BS” — but he also hasn’t glossed over how hard it’s been to mash styles together on the fly.
In Abu Dhabi, he described a meticulous personal audit running all season long: every weekend catalogued, decisions logged, mistakes dissected. The winter plan? Analyse it all, then press for changes in how his camp, and the wider team, works around him. “My surroundings in terms of personal personnel, team personnel, how you utilise people… all these different things need to be looked upon… so that we can optimise our teamwork.”
That reads like more than a casual tidy-up. It’s a driver making the case that Ferrari’s structure around him needs rebalancing — and yes, that could extend to who sits on the other end of the radio next year.
Martin Brundle, who knows a thing or two about chemistry in a garage, reckons the missing ingredient has been obvious. He pointed to the Verstappen–Lambiase axis at Red Bull: a shorthand, a trust, a fluency that lets driver and wall dance in lockstep. “That’s what Lewis has missed terribly going to Ferrari,” Brundle observed on Sky. Someone who instinctively “understands what they’re saying, what they need. All the little nuances.”
The Verstappen–GP parallel is a high bar, but it illustrates the point. The best driver-engineer pairings don’t waste words. They don’t need to. With Hamilton and Adami, you can hear the gaps — sometimes terse, sometimes silent — in a season where nothing ever quite felt easy.
It’s also easy to forget the context: this is year one of a very high-profile marriage, and Italian isn’t Hamilton’s first language. Establishing rhythm takes time. But in Ferrari time, patience is often a luxury. Results still matter, and the scoreboard has largely tilted Charles Leclerc’s way across Sundays. The SF-25 has shown flashes of proper pace, but consistency and execution kept slipping through the team’s fingers — exactly where a driver/engineer partnership earns its money.
Ferrari will bristle at the suggestion of upheaval for upheaval’s sake, and they’d be right to. Adami is respected in Maranello. Hamilton’s standards are sky-high. Those truths can coexist. What’s clear is the driver wants the team to treat operations with the same urgency it applies to aero and power unit gains.
If you’ve followed Hamilton’s career, this playbook is familiar. He’s always been forensic about surrounding himself with the right people in the right roles, then empowering them. It’s how dynasties are built. It’s also why a winter recalibration at Ferrari wouldn’t be a surprise.
The stakes are straightforward. Ferrari has a car capable of winning on merit when the stars align. Hamilton doesn’t look interested in waiting for the cosmos. He wants a structure that helps him force the issue — faster calls, cleaner weekends, fewer unforced errors. Whether that means a new voice on the radio, a tweak in responsibilities, or simply a clearer operating style, the message has been sent.
For now, Hamilton and Ferrari roll into the off-season promising more. The partnership will be back next year; the question is in what configuration. If he gets the alignment he’s after, expect the tone of those radios — and the results column — to shift with it.
