Lewis Hamilton’s long-time race engineer Peter Bonnington will not be joining the seven-time champion at Ferrari next season.
Bonnington, who has worked with Hamilton throughout the driver’s 12-year Mercedes career, has been promoted to head of race engineering.
Also known as ‘Bono’, and familiar to Formula 1 audiences as the voice that speaks to Hamilton over team radio during race weekends, Bonnington will continue to act as Hamilton’s race engineer for the remainder of this season.
The 49-year-old will also act as a race engineer for one of Mercedes’ drivers next season.
George Russell is under contract to the end of 2025 and is expected to be joined in the team next year by Mercedes’ Italian protege Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who is racing in Formula 2 this year.
Hamilton, who has won six world titles with Bonnington, will have to adapt to working with a new race engineer when he joins Charles Leclerc at Maranello from 2025.
However, he will find familiar faces at the team.
Ferrari engineer Jock Clear, who now works as a driver coach for Leclerc, was on Hamilton’s engineering team in 2013 and ‘14 before moving to Ferrari in 2015.
Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur, who ran the team with which Hamilton won the GP2 championship in 2006 before graduating to F1, is close to Hamilton and was instrumental in his joining the team.
And Mercedes engineer Loic Serra, the team’s former performance director, is also joining Ferrari later this year as head of chassis performance engineering.
It is not known whether Hamilton would have wanted Bonnington to consider moving to Ferrari with him, but the driver has a ‘non-poaching clause’ in his contract that would have prevented him doing so even if he had.
Hamilton and team principal Toto Wolff will doubtless be asked to address the situation at this weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix, which sees the sport resume action after its summer break.
In his expanded role, Bonnington will continue to report to Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin.
Shovlin, 50, oversees all engineering activities at the race track, including race strategy and support as well as engineering.
Bonnington is specifically focused on the engineering of the cars, which is the process by which the team decide on the settings each driver will use in aerodynamic and mechanical terms in the quest for optimum performance.
Red Bull take a similar approach in their team, with Max Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase also the world champions’ head of race engineering.