Ex-Schumacher engineer notes Hamilton's 'excuses'

Apr.18 (GMM) Michael Schumacher’s former race engineer at Ferrari thinks Lewis Hamilton is making “excuses” about his struggle to adapt to his new team.

The seven time world champion openly acknowledges his need to improve, but he has also made specific technical claims about the acclimatisation – including about unfamiliar brake materials and even “engine braking”.

“I don’t believe certain things,” Luca Baldisseri, who was Schumacher’s race engineer in the early 2000s and later chief track engineer, told Formula Critica.

“What he said about engine braking is excuses,” the Italian added.

“Hamilton has seen that the car is what it is and that his teammate is able to push it to the limit more than he can, and at that point it is inevitable that the finger is pointed at him. So he came up with these justifications saying ‘I can’t adapt to this braking management’.”

Baldisseri, no longer at Ferrari, thinks the Maranello based team also needs to shoulder some of the blame.

“When a driver of Hamilton’s calibre changes teams, it’s clear that the new team tries to understand what the driver had available in the previous team,” he said. “When Michael came to us in 1996, it’s clear that we asked him what his driving style was and what his concept of the car was.

“In the case of Hamilton, I don’t know if that was done, but it apparently doesn’t seem to have been done. If a driver is saying in the fourth race that he can’t adapt to a car, you inevitably have to ask yourself – what have they been doing until now?”

One of the issues, 62-year-old Baldisseri suspects, is the relationship between Hamilton and his new race engineer, Riccardo Adami.

“There is no symbiosis between them yet,” said the Italian, “and that’s a big burden for Adami because it won’t be easy.

“Toto Wolff said recently that the communication that Kimi Antonelli has today with ‘Bono’ is light years away from that between Hamilton and ‘Bono’ himself,” he added, referring to Hamilton’s long-time engineer at Mercedes.

“Hamilton speaks in monosyllables, while Kimi is like a river in full flood, in the sense that he talks about his feelings, the behaviour of the car and expresses what he needs, and in this way the track engineer has a much clearer picture of what is happening.

“Having a driver who communicates in monosyllables and also is called Lewis Hamilton, I can imagine that Adami has trouble understanding him. On team radio it often seems that they don’t understand each other – one says one thing and the other understands something else.”

According to Eurosport Italia, former Red Bull head of operations Richard Hopkins has stated that if Hamilton doesn’t up his game, Ferrari could make a bid to replace him for 2026 with Max Verstappen.

Charles Leclerc, meanwhile, admits Ferrari needs to up its game.

“I’m not thinking too much about the championship at the moment,” Hamilton’s teammate told RTBF in Saudi Arabia. “It’s certain that the more races go by, the less we can afford to lose points. We’ve already let a lot slip away at the start of the year.

“We really need to react, even if we’ve already started to do so.”