Lewis Hamilton plays down radio mismatch with race engineer amid start of his F1 journey with Ferrari, as Carlos Sainz weighs in on the situation.
The F1 Australian GP saw some radio exchanges between Hamilton and his Ferrari race engineer Riccardo Adami which made headlines not just in the racing media but mostly in general media landscape in a surprise not just to the driver and team, but also fans alike.
There were instances of disagreements, but it was expected considering it was the first race that Hamilton and Adami worked together. It wasn’t brutal as well. When asked about the same, the Brit expressed his surprise about the coverage of his new partnership.
He cited that there are worse things said between driver and race engineer than his, referring to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and Gianpiero Lambiase as an example. Hamilton played down the shenanigans. The two have since secured their first F1 sprint pole together to start the Chinese GP weekend.
“Everyone over-egged [the situation],” said Hamilton to media. “It was literally just a back-and-forth. I was very polite in how I suggested it. I said ‘leave it to me, please’. I wasn’t saying ‘F-you’, I wasn’t swearing. It was just at that point I was really struggling with the car and I needed full focus on a couple of things. We’re getting to know each other.
“He had two champions or more in the past and there are no issues between us. Go and listen to the radio calls with others and their engineers – it’s far worse. But unfortunately you make…the conversations that Max has had with his engineer over the years and the abuse that the poor guy has taken, and you never write about it, but you write about the smallest little discussion I have with mine.
“But ultimately, it is us, we’re literally just getting to know each other. Afterwards, I’m like, ‘Hey bro, I don’t need that bit of information. But if you want to give me this, this is the place I like to do it. This is how I’m feeling in the car and at these points, this is what this is, when I do and don’t need the information’. That’s what it’s about.
“There are no issues and it’s done with a smiley face, and we move forward,” summed up Hamilton. The Brit found some support from Williams’ Sainz, who is in the learning phase with his new team and race engineer and also has experience of time with Adami at Ferrari.
Sainz noted that he is going through the same that Hamilton is. In fact, he would have liked to have completed the Australian GP to learn more in tricky conditions. It was a type of grand prix that he couldn’t have prepared in Bahrain during the pre-season test programme.
When time permits, he will go through the grand prix with his race engineer as if he was competing in it. “No, no, this is the same,” said Sainz to media. “It’s exactly the same. The only difference is that unfortunately for me, I didn’t get to drive such a demanding race from communication’s side in Australia, and I’ve missed that experience to build with my engineer.
“We were talking about it just now, it’s like, we need to review this race and go through it together as I was driving it because it is exactly a kind of race where I think I can make a difference as a driver, if you help me read the situation well, and we could have caught a good result. Like in this case, Alex did, if we communicate well.
“We’re going to go through back at base at some point this race as if I was driving it, just to make sure we’ve actually raced the race, because we’ve missed an incredible chance to build up on it. Still 23 left, so I still have plenty of them to come, but yeah, it’s that one race where you have a massive learning curve, probably like Lewis and Ricky did, and they learn a lot from it, and keep moving forward.
“You cannot be too hard on yourself because it just takes time, and it takes examples like this in order to learn from this kind of situation and how am I going to test that situation in Bahrain. You’re never going to be on a wet track with cold intermediate tyres in safety car mode. How are you going to put yourself in this kind of situation in Bahrain and learn from this and say, ‘hey, there’s something here that I don’t quite like with the upshifts and it could catch me out in Australia,’ and in this case it’s exactly what happened. But how could I have prevented that in reality when you look back on it?
“There’s very little you can do to actually experience these things and you just need to give yourself a margin of races, you know, where you’re gonna go through this very steep learning curve and these kinds of things can happen where, yeah, you can be sure that you’re gonna learn a lot and give yourself a bit of margin and not to be maybe so tough on yourself because you’re gonna go through a big learning process,” summed up Sainz.
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