Riccardo Adami has been removed from his role as Hamilton’s race engineer ahead of the 2026 season
Ferrari have announced the removal of Riccardo Adami as Lewis Hamilton’s race engineer, just one week before the team launch their 2026 F1 car.
Adami, who had previously worked with Sebastian Vettel and Carlos Sainz at the Scuderia, has been moved to a role within Ferrari’s Driver Academy and their TPC (Testing of Previous Cars) programme.
Hamilton and Adami struggled to gel in the Briton’s first year at Ferrari, with miscommunication between the pair regularly heard over team radio throughout race weekends last year.
As a result, Hamilton is opting for a new ‘man-in-his-ear’ this season as he looks to bounce back after a chastening debut year in Ferrari red, in which he failed to register a podium finish.
But who is the current frontrunner to replace Adami as Hamilton’s race engineer?
Hamilton’s current performance engineer, Luca Diella, is currently believed to be the frontrunner to be Adami’s replacement, according to Italian outlet La Gazzetta dello Sport. The Independent has approached Ferrari for comment.
Diella joined Ferrari last year, having previously worked in Hamilton’s camp at Mercedes. At the time, Hamilton said of the change: "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.
"So we're getting used to each other and having to learn super, super quick."
Diella joined Mercedes in 2019, initially as a performance engineer with responsibility for the team’s optimisation of their power unit, before moving into Hamilton’s garage at the start of the 2021 season, when Hamilton infamously missed out on an eighth title on the final lap of a contentious final grand prix in Abu Dhabi.
Diella worked as the trackside performance engineer for Hamilton across four seasons, specifically as the “power unit performance engineer.”
He then moved to Ferrari ahead of the 2025 season as a race engineer for the test team, before moving to Hamilton’s garage before last year’s Belgian Grand Prix in July. At this race, Hamilton revealed he had sent documents to engineers in Maranello as the team sought an improvement in performance.
Prior to his work in F1, Diella was a development engineer at Cosworth, working on the powertrain for the Aston Martin Valkyrie hypercar, and was a team principal at Brunel Racing, leading the Brunel University Formula Student programme. He graduated from Brunel with a masters degree in Motorsport Engineering.
Should Diella take on the role as Hamilton’s race engineer, it would follow a near-identical situation across the garage with Hamilton’s teammate, Charles Leclerc.
In 2024, Leclerc grew frustrated with his former race engineer, Xavi Marcos and, a few races into that campaign, Marcos (who has since moved to Cadillac as chief race engineer) was replaced by Bryan Bozzi, who was also Leclerc’s performance engineer at the time.
A similar move for Hamilton could be in the offing, just seven weeks out from the first race of the season, the Australian Grand Prix.
Lastly, it is extremely unlikely that Hamilton’s race engineer at Mercedes, Peter “Bono” Bonnington, would relocate and make the move across to Ferrari.
Bonnington received a promotion at Mercedes last year, now acting as head of trackside performance, and is satisfied also working as race engineer for Hamilton’s replacement, Italian teenager Kimi Antonelli.
Hamilton enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Bonnington, winning all six of his world championships at the Silver Arrows with “Bono” by his side over a 12-year period. Bonnington also previously worked with Michael Schumacher at Mercedes.
Ferrari, meanwhile, reveal their 2026 car livery this Friday, 23 January. The first of three pre-season tests takes place in Barcelona next week, before the season-opener in Melbourne on 8 March.
Category: General Sports
