Fred Vasseur has had enough of the Lewis Hamilton race-engineer storyline, and he didn’t bother to hide it.
The Ferrari team principal shut down further questioning in Bahrain after Hamilton’s comments at last week’s 2026 pre-season running put a spotlight back on the Scuderia’s pitwall set-up. Hamilton had warned that switching engineers a few races into a new campaign could be “detrimental” to his hopes this year — a pointed admission given how much his debut season in red unravelled in public over the radio.
Hamilton’s 2025 was difficult on and off the stopwatch. For the first time in his career, the seven-time world champion finished a season without a podium, and his relationship with race engineer Riccardo Adami often sounded strained, awkward, and occasionally combustible. Adami, who previously worked with Sebastian Vettel and Carlos Sainz, has since been moved into a different role within Ferrari, with the team confirming last month that Hamilton will have a new race engineer for 2026.
The expectation in the paddock is that the seat will be filled by Cedric Michel-Grosjean, formerly Oscar Piastri’s trackside performance engineer at McLaren. But Michel-Grosjean is currently on what he’s described as a career break after leaving McLaren at the end of last year, and the timeline for his arrival in Maranello remains unclear. In the meantime, Hamilton has been overseen during testing by Carlo Santi — best known to long-time followers as Kimi Raikkonen’s former race engineer — and Hamilton acknowledged to media in Bahrain that his engineer “will once again change” within “a few races” once the season begins.
It was that “few races” line, and the choice of the word “detrimental”, that inevitably sparked the kind of paddock debate Ferrari rarely enjoys: is Hamilton simply being candid about an obvious performance variable, or is he already putting caveats around 2026 after suffering the worst year of his career?
Vasseur’s response was to try to drain the issue of oxygen altogether. Initially, he framed it as a misread of Hamilton’s actual mood and the team’s internal dynamics.
“It’s not exactly the discussion that we had,” Vasseur said when asked about Hamilton’s concern. “I think the collaboration between the team and Lewis on the pit wall is very good.
“It’s not that he was not committed, but [he is high] in confidence and very open to the relationship. My feeling is very positive with this and we will continue to improve. The mindset is to try to do a better job tomorrow than today.
“I think that if we have areas where we can improve, I will continue to push in this direction, but Lewis is in a very good mindset.”
But it was the second exchange, moments later, that underlined how determined Vasseur is to stop this becoming Ferrari’s dominant pre-season narrative. As another question began to circle back to Hamilton’s impending engineer change, Vasseur cut across it.
“Please stop with this story!” he snapped.
And then came the broader point he wanted on the record: Ferrari is not going to frame its prospects — or Hamilton’s — around one voice on the radio.
“If you go into the paddock of 22 cars, you have approximately six or seven new engineers each year and the same with the team principals,” Vasseur said. “I’m probably the oldest [longest-serving] one with Toto [Wolff]. You are changing three or four team principals each year and it’s not the end of the team.
“The team today is something like 1,500 people. It’s not about one race engineer.
“The guy that you see on the pit wall is leading a team of people working on the car and it’s not a matter of individuals. In F1, it’s always about the team. It’s never about an individual.”
That’s a familiar Vasseur move: widen the frame, reject the personality-driven reading of events, and bring it back to process. It’s also, plainly, an attempt to protect Hamilton as much as protect Ferrari. When a driver of Hamilton’s stature talks about something being “detrimental”, it doesn’t land like a routine operational concern — it lands like a warning label. And Ferrari, entering a new rules era in 2026, doesn’t need the first chapter of its season to be “Hamilton vs the pitwall” all over again.
Still, Vasseur’s insistence that this isn’t “about one race engineer” doesn’t make the question irrelevant; it just changes what’s being argued. Ferrari can be a 1,500-person machine and still be vulnerable at the sharp end, where races swing on a call, an interpretation, a tone of voice, a shared shorthand built over months. Hamilton knows that better than most — and last year showed what happens when that shorthand isn’t there.
For now, Ferrari is trying to keep the focus on what it can control: stabilising Hamilton’s working environment, avoiding a repeat of the messy radio dynamic of 2025, and making sure the next engineer relationship doesn’t become a weekly talking point.
Vasseur has made his position clear. If this story is going to persist, it won’t be because Ferrari is feeding it. It’ll be because the timing — a new season, a new engineer arriving late, and a champion coming off his bleakest year — makes it impossible for anyone in the paddock to pretend it doesn’t matter.
