Former McLaren performance engineer Cedric Michel-Grosjean is in line to become Lewis Hamilton’s new Ferrari race engineer for the F1 2026 season, it has been claimed.
It comes amid speculation that Carlo Santi could manage Hamilton over the course of the final two pre-season tests of F1 2026 in Bahrain..
Lewis Hamilton will have a new race engineer in F1 2026
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Ferrari announced earlier this month that Hamilton will not continue working alongside Riccardo Adami this season after the race engineer was moved to a different role within the company.
The decision was made after a trying first season together in which Hamilton and Adami didn’t seem to gel as they exchanged testy messages over the radio.
From “tea breaks” to silence, swipes at letting rival drivers from other teams through to questions about fairness, Hamilton and Adami could not make it work in their 24 races together, leaving Ferrari to decide that it would be best to separate the two.
The question now is what comes next.
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It is understood that Charles Leclerc’s race engineer Bryan Bozzi will also manage Hamilton during the opening pre-season outing in Barcelona, a behind-closed-doors test in which the teams can run for three of the five scheduled days.
Italian publication Corriere dello Sport has claimed that Santi, Kimi Raikkonen’s former race engineer, will take over Hamilton’s side of the garage for the remaining two tests in Bahrain while “waiting for a new figure to come, it seems, from McLaren.”
That “figure”, claims other publications, is Michel-Grosjean.
Michel-Grosjean was a lead trackside performance engineer on Oscar Piastri’s MCL39 last season, but reportedly left the team at the end of the year.
In his most recent LinkedIn post, he liked a post from Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur speaking about the Ferrari SF-26’s journey.
Ferrari declined to comment when approached by PlanetF1.com.
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