Ferrari confirm Lewis Hamilton engineer change amid scrutiny over F1 relationship
Ferrari have confirmed a change to Lewis Hamilton's engineering team. But the new addition led to extra issues at the Belgian Grand Prix as the seven-time Formula 1 champion's new colleague adjusts to their new position.
There has been plenty of scrutiny on the Ferrari engineers who have been working most closely with Hamilton ever since his switch to the Scuderia. Most notably, the relationship between the Brit and his race engineer Riccardo Adami has been repeatedly called into question amid a swathe of tense radio conversations.
Hamilton has continued to insist, in public at least, that he has not problem at all with Adami and that they are working together well behind the scenes. And Ferrari seem to be happy with that situation too as the Italian remains in that post, having previously served as race engineer to Carlos Sainz before the Brit's arrival.
But there has been a change to Hamilton's engineering team at large, which actually took place ahead of the Belgian GP weekend. Ferrari have now confirmed that a new performance engineer was brought into the fold – a figure who has not been named publicly by the team, but who the racer has worked with before.
"It's not easy to switch engineers within the middle of the season, but it's someone that I've known for years [and was] actually from my previous team with me, but not in that position," Hamilton confirmed. "So we're getting used to each other and having to learn super, super quick."
It was a rough weekend for Hamilton at the Circuit Spa-Francorchamps, which used the Sprint format. That meant just one hour of practice to get up to speed and it clearly wasn't enough for the Brit who suffered double Q1 exits in both qualifying sessions.
But he did recover well in the race to finish seventh and, even though the change to his engineering team made it even trickier for them to get the balance of the car right in Belgium, Hamilton sounded optimistic about what benefits the change might bring in the coming weeks and months.
He added: "I think the changes that we had [to the car this weekend] really caught both of us out, but I think we did a great job overnight and we'll just get stronger and stronger together.
"[With the] change of engineer, we're both in the deep end, basically. And I think we did a really good job overnight to rectify some of those tweaks and fine tune it. The car was so much better to drive today, so I had a lot of fun trying to make my way through.
"I think this one is definitely one to put behind me, [but] I definitely feel confident going forward. I learned more about the car today, fine-tuned it. I'll set that up better for next week. I will be at the factory on Wednesday. So yeah, I don't see why we can't have better results moving forward."
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