Lewis Hamilton’s first victory with Ferrari at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix on Sunday was built on a three-stop strategy executed with precision, but the driver himself pointed to something less technical as a key factor in his resurgence. The relationship he has developed with race engineer Carlo Santi, whom Hamilton compared favorably to the partnership that helped deliver six of his seven world championships at Mercedes, appears to be one of the more important developments of his 2026 season.
Hamilton’s debut year at Ferrari in 2025 was marked in part by a difficult dynamic with his then-race engineer, with strained exchanges over team radio becoming a visible symbol of a broader struggle to find his footing at the Italian team. That engineer left his position at the end of the season, and Santi was brought in initially as an interim replacement during preseason testing. What began as a temporary arrangement has since become one of the more productive working relationships Hamilton has had since leaving Mercedes.
An unlikely partnership that clicked immediately
Santi, 52, had spent years in factory-based roles at Ferrari after previously working trackside as a performance and race engineer for another former Ferrari driver. He was not a regular presence at races when Hamilton joined the team and the two had no prior working relationship. Hamilton described their initial connection as immediate, a rapport that developed quickly despite neither man knowing anything about the other before they were paired together.
The comparison Hamilton drew between Santi and his celebrated former Mercedes engineer, who spent years as one of the most recognizable voices in Formula 1 radio communications before moving to work with Ferrari’s current championship leader, was significant. That earlier partnership was widely credited as a central element of Hamilton’s most dominant period in the sport. Finding something comparable with a new engineer at a new team had clearly been one of the missing pieces in his first Ferrari season.
Quiet confidence on the podium
Hamilton described Santi as someone who finds it difficult to outwardly express emotion, a contrast to Hamilton’s own openly demonstrative style. The image of Hamilton pulling his engineer into a large embrace on the Barcelona podium captured the warmth of a relationship that had developed over just a few months into something genuinely meaningful for both of them. Hamilton expressed hope that the success they had shared on Sunday had reignited something in Santi as well, a renewed passion for trackside engineering after years working away from the race environment.
The mutual nature of that observation said something about how Hamilton approaches the human dimension of his profession. A race weekend involves hundreds of decisions and dozens of relationships, but the bond between driver and race engineer sits at the center of all of it, shaping everything from strategy calls to the tone of conversations during the most pressurized moments of a race.
A collective effort, not a single story
Ferrari’s team principal was careful to contextualize the Santi-Hamilton dynamic within a broader picture of organizational improvement. He acknowledged that the fit between the two was a positive one while insisting that Sunday’s result belonged to the team as a collective rather than to any individual contributor.
That framing reflects a leader who understands both the importance of relationships and the risk of building a narrative too heavily around any single component of a complex operation. Ferrari’s first race victory since October 2024 required good strategy, good execution, and good communication. Santi was part of all three. So was everyone else.
