Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari race engineer reveal in Sebastian Vettel phone call – report

Lewis Hamilton is to work with Sebastian Vettel’s former race engineer Riccardo Adami when he joins Ferrari in F1 2025, it has been claimed.

And Adami is said to have received a glowing reference from Vettel when Hamilton contacted the four-time World Champion to get an insight into the race engineer’s approach.

Lewis Hamilton to work with Sebastian Vettel’s ex-Ferrari engineer in F1 2025?

Hamilton shook the F1 world to its core earlier this year by announcing that he will join Ferrari on a multi-year contract from F1 2025, ending his long and successful association with Mercedes.

The British driver has won six of his joint-record seven World Championships with Mercedes, as well as becoming the only man to surpass 100 grand prix victories and pole positions, with the German manufacturer’s engines powering each of Hamilton’s 342 grand prix starts since his debut back in 2007.

Vettel, who retired from F1 at the end of the 2022 season, worked closely with Adami over the course of six full seasons with Ferrari between 2015-2020, winning a total of 14 races with the Scuderia.

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Since 2021, Adami has acted as race engineer to Carlos Sainz, the driver whom Hamilton will replace at Ferrari at the end of this year, winning further three grands prix including this year’s Australian Grand Prix.

Hamilton’s F1 2025 team-mate Charles Leclerc, meanwhile, has been working with a new race engineer, Bryan Bozzi, since last month’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix after previous incumbent Xavier Marcos Padros was moved to a new role within Ferrari.

Writing on Twitter, the respected F1 reporter Giuliano Duchessa has dropped a strong hint that Adami will be the voice in Hamilton’s ear next season, with the seven-time World Champion phoning Vettel “some time ago” for an initial impression of how the race engineer works.

Duchessa said: “I heard Lewis call [sic] Seb some time ago to ask about Riccardo Adami’s 2025 perspective. Obviously the feedback on the qualities was excellent.

“While LEC is very happy with Bryan Bozzi so, barring any oddities, we can expect continuity.”

The rumours that Hamilton will inherit Adami from Sainz is likely to put an end to suggestions that Peter Bonnington, his long-serving race engineer at Mercedes, could follow the seven-time World Champion to Maranello.

PlanetF1.com revealed in the days after Hamilton’s move to Ferrari was confirmed that his Mercedes contract contains a so-called “no-poaching clause”, which forbids the 39-year-old from having direct involvement in persuading his current colleagues to join him at Ferrari in F1 2025.

Following the signing of Hamilton, Ferrari announced last month that two key figures at Mercedes, Loic Serra and Jerome D’Ambrosio, will start work at Ferrari in October.

Serra, who is said to have shared Hamilton’s reservations over Mercedes’ development direction in the early years of the current ground-effect rules, will become head of chassis performance engineering, while D’Ambrosio has been appointed as deputy team principal to Fred Vasseur.

It remains to be seen when exactly Hamilton himself will be allowed to start work with Ferrari, with it not uncommon for drivers to be released early from their contracts ahead of big winter moves.

Vettel himself was freed from his Red Bull deal to test for Ferrari at Fiorano in November 2014, two months before he officially joined the Scuderia.

Speaking in April, Hamilton – whose only previous move came in 2013 when he swapped McLaren for Mercedes – vowed to take up the issue with current boss Toto Wolff.

He said: “I think it will start with a conversation with Toto because I don’t know how to navigate that.

“I don’t think I was at Mercedes until December [2012], when the first seat fitting was made after the season. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it this time.”

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