Entry route
Engineering degree, trackside years in F3/F2/GP2 or endurance racing, then into an F1 team (or promoted internally).
Highlights
Race engineer for Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari in 2026; Hamilton nicknamed him his 'Italian Bono' and the pairing took Hamilton's maiden Ferrari victory at the 2026 Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix (14 June 2026)
Race engineer for Kimi Raikkonen's final Ferrari season (2018), which delivered Raikkonen's last F1 win at the 2018 United States Grand Prix in Austin plus 12 podiums from 21 races
Built Ferrari's 'remote garage' remote-engineering function, leading factory-based operational support to the trackside team from 2019
Politecnico di Milano vehicle-dynamics engineer with a FIAT Research Centre and sportscar/endurance pedigree before joining Ferrari F1 in 2010
Research notes
CORRECTION TO TASK HINT: Lewis Hamilton's 2026 race engineer is NOT Riccardo Adami. Adami was moved to a Scuderia Ferrari Driver Academy / test-of-previous-cars role for 2026 after a difficult 2025 with Hamilton. Carlo Santi initially stepped in as interim race engineer for pre-season testing/early 2026 (other candidates reported during the search included Luca Diella and Cedric Michel-Grosjean of McLaren), and was subsequently confirmed long-term as Hamilton's race engineer;
Hamilton dubbed him his 'Italian Bono'. The pairing scored Hamilton's first Ferrari win at the 2026 Barcelona-Catalunya GP on 14 June 2026 (the day before this research). Biography from Wikipedia/PlanetF1/Sportskeeda: Italian, born 15 February 1974 in Verona (one secondary source erroneously gives 1954);
Politecnico di Milano mechanical engineering (vehicle dynamics);
FIAT Research Centre scholarship then vehicle dynamics dept;
endurance/sportscar performance engineer;
joined Ferrari ~2010 as model engineer on the first driver-in-the-loop simulator;
performance engineer to Raikkonen 2016-17;
Raikkonen's race engineer 2018 (Raikkonen's last win, 2018 US GP);
head of remote engineering 2019-2025. f1_debut_year = 2010 (joined Ferrari F1;
sportscar/FIAT work predates this). years_to_race_engineer = 8 (2010 Ferrari entry to first race-engineer seat in 2018 with Raikkonen). Exact start years for the FIAT and endurance stints and his Politecnico graduation year are not precisely sourced. The 'Italian Bono' tag is a Hamilton-coined nickname rather than a radio call sign.