Fred Vasseur has defended Ferrari’s plan of action after Lewis Hamilton described his F1 race engineer situation as potentially “detrimental” to the start of his season.
After a tumultuous, podium-less debut season with the Scuderia, Hamilton has opted to ditch race engineer Riccardo Adami after a fraught relationship, with disagreements regularly playing out over team radio last year.
Hamilton will work with Carlo Santi, Kimi Raikkonen’s race engineer in 2018, on an interim basis for the first few races of the new season. It is widely expected that Cedric Michel-Grosjean, formerly Oscar Piastri’s performance engineer at McLaren, will become Hamilton’s full-time race engineer.
However, Michel-Grosjean is taking what he describes as a “career break” after leaving McLaren at the end of last season, leaving Hamilton in a situation which he last week acknowledged was sub-optimal as he prepared for the 2026 campaign.
Yet when asked about the topic last week at testing in Bahrain, Ferrari’s team principal Vasseur insisted Hamilton remains upbeat. “I think the collaboration between the team and Lewis on the pit wall is very good,” he said.
“It’s not that he was not committed, but [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.”
When asked further about the race engineer situation, Vasseur interrupted the question and said: “Please stop with this story! 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.
“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.”
The final pre-season test takes place this week in Bahrain (18-20 February), with the first race of the season – the Australian Grand Prix – on 8 March. Hamilton is set to work with Santi, whose job reads as Ferrari’s head of remote engineering, at both events.
