Anyone who listened carefully noticed that Max Verstappen was communicating with someone different than normal over the on-board radio today. His regular race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase was present, but fulfilled a different role. Lambiase will resume his normal role tomorrow.
Verstappen was replaced by Formula E champion Jake Dennis during the first free practice. The British driver was used as a rookie as Red Bull still had to comply with the free practice sessions for young drivers. During this session Dennis also did not work with Lambiase as a race engineer. During the second training it was noticeable that Verstappen also worked with someone else, but this was only the case once.
Verstappen communicated with performance engineer Tom Hart in FP2. He was allowed to take over the services of Lambiase on a one-off basis, who was, by the way, present on the Red Bull pit wall. Tomorrow everything will be as usual during the third free practice and qualifying. So it was also a kind of experiment for Hart, it does not seem that Red Bull is thinking of making him Verstappen’s permanent racing engineer. That would be strange, because Verstappen previously indicated that he would not be able to work without Lambiase. Lambiase thinks the same about this, as he recently shared.
2023-11-24 15:08:03
#Verstappen #race #engineer #Lambiase #FP2
