The dissolution of Lewis Hamilton’s relationship with former race engineer Riccardo Adami will go down as a significant chapter in the Englishman’s adjustment to life at Ferrari.
Though it’s only one relationship in a team of hundreds of people, the connection between driver and race engineer is fundamental to performance.
With Adami gone but with his permanent replacement unnamed, will Hamilton’s performances improve in 2026?
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Meanwhile, Supercars champion James Courtney will take on a new role at next weekend’s Australian Grand Prix.
And though Yuki Tsunoda won’t be on the grid in Melbourne, he will appear on track sometime this year despite being sacked as a full-time driver at the end of 2025.
FORMER FERRARI ENGINEER WEIGHS IN ON HAMILTON CHANGES
The foundering of Lewis Hamilton’s relationship with Ricciardo Adami is on the race engineer, not the driver, according to former Ferrari and Williams engineer Rob Smedley.
Hamilton’s difficult first season with Ferrari featured several high-profile and awkward radio exchanges with race engineer Adami, whom he inherited from Carlos Sainz.
Frequently the pair seemed to be on different wavelengths during moments of on-track tension, which appeared to be a window into the difficulty the seven-time champion was having gelling with the team.
Though both Hamilton and Ferrari denied any problem in the Briton’s working relationship with Adami, the Italian engineer has left the pit wall for a role in the team’s junior driver program this year.
Hamilton will be temporarily engineered by Carlo Santi before later in the year getting a permanent replacement, which paddock speculation suggests will be Oscar Piastri’s former lead trackside performance engineer, Cédric Michel-Grosjean.
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Smedley was Felipe Massa’s race engineer for most of the Brazilian’s Ferrari career, including his title tilt of 2008, and later moved to Williams as trackside operations chief in 2014 before quitting the sport in 2018.
Despite Ferrari’s protestations to the contrary, Smedley said it was clear from the team radio exchanges that the relationship wasn’t healthy.
“If you’re having those types of comments on the radio, I guess the relationship is not quite fully formed, and that’s where it can be not healthy,” he told the High Performance podcast. “I think this is a very clear presentation that his frustration is boiling over.
“I do think it’s the job of a race engineer to know enough about the car and have some level of expertise in all areas and be across your job enough that when the driver asks a question — again, they’re in the car on their own, they’re driving the car at 200 miles per hour — [you can] answer it quickly.
“It really pains me when I hear, ‘We’ll get back to you’. Mate, you’re not a call centre. The guy is trying to perform at 10 tenths of their performance. Answer him. Give him confidence. Let them know that you know what you’re doing.
“Otherwise it’s like, ‘I’ll get back to you, I need to go and ask an adult’.
“These are the tiny things that erode confidence and trust. That’s when the relationship starts to become more tetchy and more difficult.”
Smedley’s engineering career left him in doubt that it was up to the engineer to adapt to the driver, not the other way around.
“I think if it’s the other way around, the race engineer hasn’t really got the meaning of their job or even life,” he said.
“You’re the engineer, you’re the one who gels the whole thing together. You’ve got this athlete, this driver in the car, who has all the foibles that all us mere mortals have, but they are focused on doing their bit. You have the bandwidth to step back and understand what it is that they need.
“I think when it doesn’t work, it’s because the race engineer either hasn’t recognised it and can’t make it work, or they’re not prepared to compromise that far.
“Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.”
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SUPERCARS CHAMP’S ‘FEATHER IN THE CAP’ FIA CALL-UP
James Courtney, the 2010 Supercars champion, will take on the role of driving standards monitor for the Formula 2 and Formula 3 races at next weekend’s Australian Grand Prix at Albert Park.
Courtney, who retired from full-time competition at the end of last season, received the call-up from the FIA after being recommended for the job by two long-time friends.
One was Adrian Burgess, the former Jordan F1 team sporting director and Supercars head of motorsport who now serves as the principal of Team 18. The other was his former manager Alan Gow, the FIA touring car commissioner and chief executive of the British Touring Car Championship.
The role will see him working with the stewards for the F1 feeder categories alongside his television punditry work for Fox Sports in Melbourne.
“It was a surprise, but it’s an honour to be called up, and I’m really excited,” Courtney told the Supercars website. “It’s an important role, and one I’m keen for.
“They have a driving code, and say there’s a line ball incident, I have to give them the opinion from a driver’s point of view.
“Like Bairdo [Supercars driving standards adviser Craig Baird] here, I don’t make a call on the punishment — it’s more a case of determining who’s at fault, especially if it’s not clear from the naked eye.”
Courtney was once on a trajectory to Formula 1, having left Australia for championship-winning karting career in Europe. He won the British Formula Ford title in 2000 but was a contender for the British Formula 3 championship when a 67g crash testing for the Jaguar F1 team in 2002 — the car’s suspension failed at 306 kilometres per hour — derailed his international career.
It took him a year to recover, and after winning the Japanese Formula 3 championship in 2003, he eventually found his way to Supercars in 2005 and to the national title in 2010.
Courtney said it was pleasing for his extensive domestic and international experience to be recognised.
“I have a lot of experience from being on the other side of the fence, so sitting in this position is something that excites me,” he said.
“It’s quite a feather in the cap to be singled out.
“It’s a great news story for Supercars as a championship, that we’re at a level where the FIA chooses to pick one of us as opposed to bringing one of their own.”
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TSUNODA SET FOR TRACK TIME IN 2026
Red Bull reserve driver Yuki Tsunoda will get behind the wheel of the Racing Bulls 2026 car during practice sessions this year, the team has confirmed.
Tsunoda raced for Faenza from his 2021 debut until his Red Bull Racing call-up two rounds into 2025. His struggles alongside Max Verstappen, however, saw him dropped from the team at the end of the season in favour is Isack Hadjar, though he’s retained a place on the roster as a reserve driver for both Red Bull-owned teams.
Racing Bulls boss Alan Permane said having an experienced driver working on the new regulations would be an asset for both teams, revealing that he’ll get practice outings with at least his team and potentially the senior Red Bull Racing team as well.
“It’s great to have Yuki still in the family,” he said, per RacingNews365.
“He’s been part of this team for a long time. It’s good that he’s still going to be in the paddock.
“His input will be very, very valuable, he will help us out a lot with simulator running.
“He will do some Fridays — I’m not sure if in both cars or just ours — but he will feature in FP1 running. But a lot of his work will be simulator support for us.
“That’s really fantastic for us to have someone of his calibre helping us over a race weekend, driving our simulator.”
Tsunoda’s career has been backed by Honda, whose relationship with Red Bull earned him a place in the brand’s junior driver program, which eventually led to his 2021 debut.
There was a dispute earlier this year, however, whether Tsunoda being retained at Red Bull, which now produces its own power unit in partnership with Ford, would conflict with his relationship with the Japanese auto giant.
Honda admitted in January that Tsunoda had yet to sign a new contract with the brand owing to the conflict, with negotiations continuing with Red Bull. Honda, however, still considers Tsunoda an affiliated driver.
Speculation has suggested Tsunoda could eventually find his way to Aston Martin given its status as the Honda works team from this season.
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