Lewis Hamilton’s race engineer from the 2025 Formula 1 season has been moved to a new role at Ferrari.
Riccardo Adami will take over as manager of the Ferrari driver academy and their programme for testing previous cars.
A Ferrari statement made no reference to Hamilton by name, saying only: “The appointment of the new race engineer for car number 44 will be announced in due course.”
The move comes after consistent speculation throughout the 2025 campaign there were communication problems between Hamilton and Adami.
Hamilton, 41, always denied that was the case and insisted their relationship was fine, despite the impression left by a number of their conversations over team radio.
The relationship with their race engineer is one of the most important for any driver.
The engineer is the person the driver talks to over the radio from the car, they decide together on changes to improve a car’s performance and at times the role is as much a counsellor as colleague.
Before joining Ferrari, Hamilton worked with one engineer at Mercedes – Peter Bonnington – for all his 12 years at the team.
Seven-time champion Hamilton had a difficult first season at Ferrari and spoke a number of times of his belief changes were needed within the organisation, without specifying what they were.
Ferrari’s statement added: “[Adami’s] extensive trackside experience and Formula 1 expertise contributes to the development of future talent and to strengthening performance culture across the program.”
Testing previous cars programmes have become important within F1 as ways of giving young drivers experience, with in-season testing in current cars heavily restricted.
Hamilton was outperformed by team-mate Charles Leclerc during his first season at Ferrari.
The Briton finished one place and 84 points behind Leclerc in the championship and was beaten by the Monegasque 22 times to seven in qualifying at an average advantage of 0.15 seconds a lap. Leclerc’s average grid position was 5.6 while Hamilton’s was 9.5.
Hamilton was knocked out in the first session of qualifying for the final three races of the season.
At the final race of the year in Abu Dhabi there was an apparently awkward between Hamilton and Adami, when the Briton told his engineer not to inform him who was ahead of him on track.
Having been advised the car in front was Sauber’s Gabriel Bortoleto, Hamilton responded: “Stop telling me I’m racing people. I know I’m racing him, man. Just leave me to it. I’m racing everyone ahead of me.”
Adami previously worked with both Carlos Sainz and Sebastian Vettel – and had an at-times strained relationship with the German.
There were a number of times during the 2017-18 season, when Ferrari had a competitive car but let their title hopes slip away with a series of mistakes, when Vettel ran out of patience with the team’s race operations.
Sainz also questioned the team’s strategy choices on a number of occasions during his four years at Ferrari.
