Seven-time F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton will be working with a new race engineer from the Miami Grand Prix onwards, according to reports.
Hamilton has had a much better start to his second season at Ferrari than his first, already having picked up a grand prix podium and sitting up in fourth in the drivers’ championship.
Following a dismal 2025 season in which he struggled to settle into his new surroundings and was beaten by team-mate Charles Leclerc by 86 points, Hamilton split from his race engineer Riccardo Adami.
But heading into the 2026 season, Ferrari hadn’t hired a permanent new race engineer for the Brit, so Carlo Santi took over the duties, the current head of remote engineering at the team.
And now, with a five-week break from the sport due to the cancellation of the Saudi Arabian and Bahrain Grands Prix, Motorsport.com are reporting that Ferrari have hired a permanent race engineer for the 41-year-old to take over from the Miami GP onwards.
They report that Frenchman Cedric Michel-Grosjean will officially take over the role from that race weekend, which kicks off on Friday May 1 with FP1 and sprint qualifying.
Who is Cedric Michel-Grosjean?
Michel-Grosjean previously spent nine years at McLaren in a plethora of different roles, but speculation of a move to Ferrari started circling when the Frenchman claimed on LinkedIn that he was on a ‘career break’.
It’s thought that this career break was a period of gardening leave having left the Woking-based outfit at the end of the 2025 season.
Having been a trackside car performance engineer for the majority of his time at McLaren, Michel-Grosjean began more closely working with Oscar Piastri in June 2023, before becoming lead trackside performance engineer in January 2025.
In this role, he was responsible for Piastri’s car performance optimisation and driving development by providing direct support in all racing and testing events across the 2025 calendar.
It meant that he oversaw all of Piastri seven grand prix victories in 2025, as McLaren claimed constructors’ championship success for a second consecutive year.
