Ferrari to poach ex-McLaren engineer for Lewis Hamilton role?

Ferrari are reportedly targeting a former senior McLaren figure to become Lewis Hamilton’s next F1 race engineer.

Seven-time world champion Hamilton will have a new race engineer for the upcoming 2026 season after Ferrari confirmed that Riccardo Adami had been moved into a new role within the team’s Academy.

Charles Leclerc’s race engineer, Bryan Bozzi, engineered both his regular driver and Hamilton during Ferrari’s Fiorano shakedown last Friday and is expected to do the same during the Barcelona shakedown, with team’s only running one car per day.

In the meantime, the search for Hamilton’s next race engineer is well underway, with speculation rife since the announcement.

Italian publication Corriere dello Sport reports that Ferrari are “waiting for a new figure to come, it seems, from McLaren.”

This is thought to be Cedric-Michel Grosjean, who most recently served as McLaren’s lead trackside performance engineer and worked closely with Oscar Piastri.

Grosjean left McLaren at the end of the 2025 season. He is currently on a “career break” according to his LinkedIn page.

The Frenchman liked a post from Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur speaking about the team’s SF-26 challenger.

Luca Diella, who currently serves as Hamilton’s performance engineer, has also been linked as a potential candidate to takeover the race engineer position.

Sky Sports F1 commentator David Croft said the change “heaps pressure” on Hamilton, who turned 41 earlier this month.

“It has not come as a surprise whatsoever,” Croft told The F1 Show. “That wasn’t a relationship that was going anywhere in a positive way.

“It’s difficult isn’t it? You throw people together and hope that it works. Good companies, good managers, they find a way to integrate people into teams. Bad managers find a way not to integrate people properly and sadly in this respect it didn’t work out.

“But this heaps the pressure on Lewis, it really does. He is more than good enough to cope with that pressure. He’s more than good enough to come through and I hope will feel comforted by the fact he will have an engineer that he has a better relationship with.

“I’m pretty certain there’s somebody already at Ferrari who will step into a new role and move up and that Lewis will have known from years before.”