Carlo Santi

Research notes and caveats

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.