Lewis Hamilton's race engineer uncertainty sparks concern from Karun Chandhok

Former Formula 1 driver and Sky Sports F1 analyst Karun Chandhok has raised concerns about Lewis Hamilton's Ferrari race engineer changes.

The seven-time champion is currently working with an interim race engineer during private testing for the 2026 F1 season after Ferrari confirmed earlier in January that his 2025 race engineer, Riccardo Adami, would move to another role.

Hamilton joined the Maranello outfit ahead of the 2025 season. While he celebrated a sprint race victory in China, he failed to finish on the podium for a grand prix in his first year with the team. In addition to the struggles in adapting to the new squad, the British driver didn't seem to click with Adami, with numerous moments of annoyance between the two being aired live to viewers.

Ferrari is yet to confirm who will step into Adami's role for 2026 and the delay in this has rung alarm bells for Chandhok.

“The other thing that’s ringing alarm bells for me is his engineer situation,” Chandhok told Sky Sports F1.

“As far as we understand, Bryan Bozzi, who is Charles Leclerc's race engineer, was running the car [on Tuesday], including for Lewis. That confuses me, if I’m perfectly honest. That relationship between driver and race engineer is so, so important.

“Getting the feedback from the driver, in my experience, a good engineer-driver relationship are the unspoken things. When one is complaining about something, the other is able to finish their sentence and say 'we're going to do this'.”

He added: “They haven’t created a situation where Lewis is building that relationship over the winter.

“I would have loved to see him do simulator days [or] go and get a TPC car and bond with a new race engineer. You need to integrate that person into the engineering set-up of the race team. They have to work in an environment along with the other engineers when the driver is not around. 

“The public hear the driver-engineer discussion, but that’s just a microcosm of the bigger conversations happening in that engineering office. To me, I’m slightly confused that as we sit here, we’ve already started testing, that bonding and relationship-building hasn’t started, off the back of a season which was not good.”