Lewis Hamilton finally stood on the top step of the podium for the first time in Ferrari colours last weekend after taking victory in the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix.
The result marked a significant turnaround for the seven-time World Champion, who endured his worst season in Formula 1 after joining the Scuderia at the start of 2025 when he struggled to adapt to the team’s SF-25 car.
Since then, Hamilton has built an engineering team around him that has allowed him to extract the most out of Ferrari’s 2026 challenger, the SF-26, a car the Briton was involved in developing last year and over the winter.
And just as importantly, Hamilton has struck up a strong working relationship with Carlo Santi, his new race engineer. But just who is the man he describes as “my Italian Bono”?
Who is Carlo Santi?
Carlo Santi is 52 years old and was born in Verona in northern Italy. He has spent more than a decade at the Ferrari F1 team, working closely with Kimi Raikkonen during the 2016 and 2017 seasons, before becoming the Finn’s race engineer in 2018.
This culminated in him standing alongside Raikkonen on the podium for his final F1 win at the 2018 United States Grand Prix, before Santi moved into a leadership role over the following years at Ferrari, where he worked within the ‘remote garage’, helping to support the drivers and team on a race weekend from back at the Maranello HQ.
Santi said working for Ferrari had been a dream of his since he was a boy – and even after joining the company it took him a long time to get to work with the Formula 1 operation.
“Ever since I was a youngster, working for the Scuderia was my ultimate goal. However, the path that led me here was not straightforward,” he told the official Ferrari website last year.
“After graduating in Mechanical Engineering, specialising in land vehicles at the Milan Polytechnic, I accepted a scholarship for a project at the FIAT Research Centre in Turin, and after that, I joined the vehicle dynamics department.
“I first worked in racing five years later, when I joined an endurance racing team as a performance engineer. Next, I finally joined the Scuderia as a model engineer for the first driving simulator that was then under development.
“15 years on, after working across driving simulation, vehicle dynamics, race engineering and vehicle performance, I’m still here, suffering when things don’t go well and rejoicing after every win.”
That was last year, but Hamilton’s struggles during his maiden season with Ferrari in 2025 meant the seven-time champion was looking to make a change from his original race engineer Riccardo Adami, and it was Santi who stepped up, at the beginning of this season.
Speaking about the change, Hamilton said back in February: “Firstly, with Riccardo it was a pretty difficult decision to make, and I’m really, really grateful for all the effort he put in last year, and his patience – it was a difficult year for us all.”
Although Santi’s new role was initially supposed to be temporary, the pair have struck up a strong working relationship which has helped Hamilton to take a victory and two second places in the last three Grands Prix.
‘The Italian Bono’
Santi’s relationship with Hamilton has already drawn comparisons with that of Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington, who was Hamilton’s race engineer for his entire decade-long tenure at Mercedes.
The pair won six Drivers’ titles together before Hamilton left at the end of 2024, with Bonnington then taking on the same race engineer role for Hamilton’s replacement, Kimi Antonelli. Bonnington has since helped guide the Italian teenager to five wins in seven races, as well as the lead in the Drivers’ standings.
“Having that driver-engineer collab, it’s hit and miss sometimes,” said Hamilton ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix earlier this month. “With me and Bono, we hit it [off] right from the beginning. He had a good working relationship with Michael [Schumacher, who Bonnington engineered briefly before Hamilton at Mercedes].
“I do feel like Carlo is like my ‘Italian Bono’. I told Bono that the other day – in terms of, he [Santi] is a bit of an OG.
“He’s an older guy that’s been around the block. He’s very calm. This is a detail that we were able to go into together. Our understanding of the engineering side, I think it’s something that’s worth remembering.”
‘He’s absolutely awesome’
Now only 41 points behind Antonelli in the championship, Hamilton explained what makes a strong driver-race engineer dynamic.
“The driver-engineer working together is very, very important,” he said. “I think last year, Adami and I had a really good relationship. He’s a lovely guy. We worked relatively well together.
“But I think catering to a driver’s needs takes time to learn. When you’re giving an engineer feedback, they’re understanding through-corner balance. They’re understanding all the elements that contribute to the struggles that you’ve got. When you try to describe what it is, the problem you have, corner by corner, entry, middle, and exit, or you dissect it into five sections if you want.”
And after he raced to P2 in the Canadian Grand Prix last month, Hamilton was full of praise for Santi.
“I chose a different set-up this weekend, just ciphering through the data, working really well with my engineer – he’s absolutely awesome and I’m really loving working with him,” he said.
“My number two did a fantastic job this weekend, helped me really pull more performance out of the car, getting into a much sweeter place, and I was able to attack all the corners finally.
“As I said, there’s a lot of changes that I’ve had to ask for, and Fred [Vasseur, Ferrari Team Principal] has been super supportive, and again, also moving mountains in order to make me comfortable. It’s finally starting to show in my performance, so thank you to the team.”
Hamilton said during pre-season testing that Santi’s role would only be temporary but given how well they are working together, they look set to continue as a pairing for the moment.
Time will tell if the seven-time champ and his “Italian Bono” will have even more to celebrate in the weeks and months to come, after their maiden win together in Barcelona.
