Lewis Hamilton reignited his war of words with Max Verstappen by hitting out at the “abuse” the Red Bull driver gives his own race engineer.
Hamilton endured a miserable debut weekend for Ferrari in Melbourne last week after qualifying eighth and finishing 10th, before he dismissed any talk he was further annoyed by the team’s operations at Albert Park.
A strategic gamble cost him any chance of challenging for a potential win and led to an angry rebuke over radio to his race engineer Ricciardo Adami, which was one of many flashpoints among the radio chatter in the pair’s first outing together.
Hamilton denied there’s any frustration with Adami ahead of this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix, and instead pointed to the repeated outbursts from his rival Verstappen towards his own engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, as an example of how other drivers are far worse at turning the air blue.
“Everyone overreacted,” Hamilton said on Thursday. “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 a car and I needed full focus on at least a couple of things.
“Afterwards, I was like, ‘Hey bro, I don’t need that bit of information but if you want to give me this, this is the place I’d like to do it. This is how I’m feeling in the car and at these points, this is the point I do and don’t need the information.’
“That’s what it’s about. There’s no issues in it. It’s done with a smiley face, and we move forward.”
He added: “Go and listen to the radio calls with others and their engineers – far worse.
“The conversation that Max has with an engineer [Lambiase] over the years, the abuse that the poor guy’s taken and you never write about it, but you wrote about the smallest little discussion I had with mine.”
Hamilton backed his veteran colleague Adami, who previously engineered Carlos Sainz Jr, now at Williams, and retired four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel, and insisted now is not the moment to throw the toys out of the pram.
“It wasn’t the race that we want but we move forward and everyone here has their heads high and the energy is still good in the garage,” he said. “We are not defined by that, and we will not defined by one race.”
