Lewis Hamilton will begin the 2026 season with yet another voice in his ear, and in Ferrari’s world that’s never just a box-tick on an org chart.
Carlo Santi has been installed as Hamilton’s race engineer for the start of the new campaign, replacing Riccardo Adami after a strained 2025 partnership that never found its rhythm. Hamilton’s first year in red ended without a single grand prix podium, and while the car inevitably takes its share of the blame, the radio traffic told its own story: awkward pauses, terse exchanges, and the kind of friction that doesn’t stay neatly contained inside the cockpit.
Ferrari has been careful in how it’s framed the change. Adami, a long-serving figure, has been moved into a different role within the company rather than shown the door. Santi’s appointment, too, comes with an asterisk — Hamilton has already described it as being for “a few races”, with Oscar Piastri’s former McLaren trackside performance engineer Cedric Michel-Grosjean widely expected to become the longer-term solution. Even by modern F1 standards, where personnel reshuffles are constant, that’s a lot of instability to bake into a driver-engineer relationship that is supposed to be built on habit and trust.
Hamilton himself hasn’t pretended it’s ideal. Speaking in Bahrain, he voiced concern that changing race engineers during the season could be “detrimental” to what he’s trying to achieve in 2026 — a fair point when you consider how long he and Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington worked together at Mercedes, and how much of Hamilton’s operating rhythm was shaped by that continuity.
Fred Vasseur’s response was pure Vasseur: impatient with the noise, eager to normalise the situation. He urged people to “stop with this story”, arguing turnover is common up and down the pitlane. And he’s not wrong on the macro level — engineers move, structures evolve, and the paddock rarely stands still.
But Hamilton isn’t “the macro level”. He’s a seven-time world champion trying to reboot a project at the sport’s most politically charged team, in a year when everyone is defining what “good” looks like all over again. Small disconnects become big ones when they land in the most public place possible: the team radio.
That’s where Rob Smedley’s intervention this week cut through. Speaking on the High Performance podcast, the former Ferrari race engineer — best known in red for his time with Felipe Massa — offered the kind of blunt reality check engineers tend to appreciate, and drivers tend to agree with, even if nobody says it out loud.
Smedley described the race engineer’s job as a 50/50 split: technical mastery and human understanding in equal measure. In his view, the race engineer functions as a driver’s “head coach” inside an F1 team — the conduit between the cockpit and the wider organisation — and if that relationship hasn’t properly formed, the cracks show quickly.
He referenced the kinds of exchanges heard between Hamilton and Adami last season, from pointed remarks about timing and “tea breaks” to the uncomfortable silences that sometimes followed questions. For Smedley, that’s not background noise; it’s a warning light.
“If those kinds of comments are happening on the radio, the relationship isn’t fully formed yet,” he said, adding that it’s a sign frustrations are “boiling over” and can easily turn unhealthy.
And then came the line that will resonate in every engineering office up and down the pitlane: “This isn’t a call centre.”
Smedley’s point was simple. When a driver is asking something at 200mph, they’re not looking for a ticket number and a promise of a callback. They want a clear answer, quickly, because confidence is a performance tool. “We’ll get back to you” might be technically honest, but it can be corrosive — not because the driver expects omniscience, but because hesitation in those moments chips away at the sense that the person on the other end truly has them covered.
Crucially, Smedley didn’t reduce the Adami situation to incompetence or blame. He acknowledged Adami’s reputation, his successful career, and the fact he was recommended to Hamilton by Sebastian Vettel — a driver Adami worked with effectively. But, as Smedley put it, sometimes it just doesn’t gel. His own example was Massa in 2006: if the chemistry isn’t there, it doesn’t matter how good the CV looks.
That’s the uncomfortable reality Ferrari is now managing. The team can talk about normal turnover all it likes, but Hamilton isn’t looking for normal. He’s looking for the kind of seamless, almost subconscious collaboration he had with Bonnington — the shorthand built over years, where questions are anticipated and information lands in exactly the right tone.
Santi, as Räikkönen’s former race engineer, arrives with serious pedigree and an understanding of what an elite driver needs from the pit wall. But if this is genuinely a short-term arrangement, it also places him in a difficult middle ground: expected to deliver immediate clarity and calm, while everyone knows a longer-term pairing may already be in motion.
Ferrari will hope the reset itself is the tonic — that a fresh voice, even temporarily, lowers the temperature and removes the edge that crept into the exchanges last year. Hamilton, meanwhile, needs momentum early in 2026, because the longer a team is “still aligning”, the harder it becomes to turn that into points and results when the season gets busy.
Smedley’s “call centre” jab wasn’t just a neat soundbite. It was a reminder that, in an era obsessed with systems and process, the most expensive racing operation on earth can still be undone by something as basic — and as fragile — as two people failing to speak the same language under pressure.
