SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Lewis Hamilton played down talk of friction with his new Ferrari race engineer Riccardo Adami and said he had no issues with the Italian after some terse radio exchanges in last weekend’s Australian season-opener.
The seven times world champion, who has joined from Mercedes this season, repeatedly told Adami to “leave it to me” on being offered information by the engineer during the wet race in Melbourne.
Hamilton, who finished 10th on his Ferrari race debut in Australia, told reporters ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix on Thursday that the reaction from media pundits had been “over-egged”.
“I was very polite in how I suggested it. I said: ‘leave it to me, please’… I wasn’t swearing. It was just, at that point, I was really struggling with the car. I needed full focus on these couple of things,” he added.
“We’re getting to know each other. He’s obviously had two champions or more in the past and there’s no issues between us,” added the 40-year-old.
Adami previously worked with four times world champion Sebastian Vettel and Hamilton’s immediate predecessor Carlos Sainz.
Hamilton has spent the last 12 years working with Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington at Mercedes and is having to adapt to a new environment.
The Briton suggested other drivers were far more spiky over the radio.
“The conversation that (Red Bull’s) Max (Verstappen) has with his engineer over the years, the abuse that the poor guy’s taken and you never write about it. But you write about the smallest little discussion I had with mine,” he said.
(Writing by Alan Baldwin in London, editing by Toby Davis)
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