Lewis Hamilton has been warned that “alarm bells” are ringing amid the ongoing speculation as to who his new Formula 1 race engineer will be for his second season with Ferrari.
The Brit is guaranteed a new engineer on the pit wall this year, after the Scuderia opted to shuffle previous incumbent Riccardo Adami into a new role.
No confirmation is forthcoming, but recent speculation has seen McLaren’s former Lead Trackside Performance Engineer Cedric-Michel Grosjean the favourite to land the position.
For this week’s behind-closed-doors test in Barcelona, Bryan Bozzi, the race engineer of team-mate Charles Leclerc, is doubling his duties to perform the same role for Hamilton as well.
But according to former F1 driver-turned-pundit Karun Chandhok, this could spell some negative uncertainty.
“The other thing that’s ringing alarm bells for me is his engineer situation,” he told Sky 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’.”
Lack of integration could prove to be an issue for Lewis Hamilton and new engineer
Chandhok has theorised that the relatively short time Hamilton’s new engineer will have to get up to speed and build a relationship with the seven-time World Champion might put both parties on the back foot.
“They haven’t created a situation where Lewis is building that relationship over the winter,” he said.
“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.”
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