Hamilton: “Santi will be my engineer for a few races and then we will change. It will be bad for me”

After Adami As has been known for a few weeks, Riccardo Adami will no longer be Lewis Hamilton’s track engineer for the 2026 Formula 1 season. Ferrari has in fact announced that the Italian has moved on to take care of the Ferrari Driver Academy and the test program with single-seaters from previous years.
In the tests following Hamilton there is Carlo Santi, who worked from 2016 to 2018 in the same position with Kimi Raikkonen, before moving on to a top role in Maranello’s remote manager.
As reported by AutoRacer, the role of track engineer for the English champion could be Cedric Michel-Grosjean, Oscar Piastri’s former right-hand man at McLaren and currently on gardening leave, who recently put a more than suspicious like on a post on LinkedIn in which Vasseur talked about the Ferrari SF-26. Hamilton’s comment After his first day of testing on the track, Lewis Hamilton was asked about this change in his working group: “Obviously it was a very difficult decision to make with Riccardo. I’m really grateful to him for all the effort he put in last year and for his patience, because it was a rather difficult year for all of us.” In the statements published by PlanetF1, Hamilton then spoke about the current collaboration with Santi, which should be extended for the first rounds of 2026: “The current solution is only for a few races, it is not long-term. So at the beginning of the season there will be another change and I will have to learn to work with someone new. This is also bad for me, because it is a year you would like to arrive at with people with whom you have already played several seasons together. But this is the situation and I will try to do my best. The team he is trying to do his best to help me make the transition as smooth as possible.”