F1 Race Engineers: What the Team Radio Archive Shows
You can watch a race engineer change hands in the radio archive
Drivers address their race engineer by first name, so the archive quietly records who was in whose ear. Two of those pairings begin and end inside our data, and you can see both happen.
Carlos Sainz did not say the word "ricky" once in 719 lines of radio before 2021. From 2021 he said it twenty times.
That is the year he joined Ferrari and was paired with race engineer Riccardo Adami. The archive did not set out to record who was in his ear. It recorded it anyway, because drivers talk to their engineers the way anyone talks to a colleague: by first name.
We counted every mention across eight seasons of transcribed team radio to see how much of that is visible in the data.
Why the name is in there at all
A race engineer is the single voice a driver hears all weekend. They are on the pit wall, they call the strategy, they read out the gaps, and they are the person a driver argues with at the end of a bad lap. That relationship is close enough that drivers rarely use a job title. They use a name.
So a body of transcribed radio is, incidentally, a register of those pairings. Our team radio archive covers 2018 to 2026, which is long enough that some pairings begin inside it and some end inside it.
The two changes the data can actually prove
Pairing
Period
Driver lines
Name mentions
Sainz, before Ferrari
2018-2020
719
**0**
Sainz, at Ferrari with Adami
2021-2024
1,145
**20**
Stroll, with Brad Joyce
2019-2021
393
**18**
Stroll, after Joyce
2023-2024
228
**0**
Caption: Driver-spoken lines only. Mentions counted across whole seasons.
Sainz's "ricky" appears exactly when the pairing starts. Seven hundred and nineteen lines of radio across three seasons at Toro Rosso, Renault and McLaren without the word once, and then it arrives in 2021 with Ferrari and stays for four seasons.
Stroll's "brad" disappears exactly when the pairing ends. Brad Joyce engineered Lance Stroll until late in 2021, and eighteen mentions across 393 lines is a rate of roughly one every twenty two lines. Across 228 lines afterwards we would have expected about ten more. There are none.
Both of those are the kind of change you would normally learn from a team press release. Here it is legible in what the driver said.
Two changes the data cannot prove, and why we are saying so
Lewis Hamilton says "bono" sixteen times in the archive, all of it during his Mercedes years with Peter Bonnington, who stayed at Mercedes when Hamilton moved to Ferrari. It is tempting to present that as a third example.
It is not one. We hold only 151 lines of Hamilton radio from 2025 and 2026. At his Mercedes rate of roughly one mention per 143 lines, we would expect about one mention in that period. Finding zero tells us nothing at all. The same applies to Sainz leaving Ferrari: 63 lines is far too few to read anything into.
The rule we applied is simple and worth stating because it is what separates a finding from a coincidence: an absence only means something if the sample was large enough to have shown the thing. Two of our four candidate stories passed that test. Two did not, and are here as failures rather than quietly dropped.
Who else names names
The same count surfaces a few other habits.
George Russell says "toto" nine times, which is not an engineer at all but Toto Wolff, the team principal. Very few drivers name the person running the team on an open channel.
Max Verstappen says "gp" eight times, for Gianpiero Lambiase. It is a rare case of a nickname short enough to survive transcription intact, and one of the best known partnerships on the grid.
Carlos Sainz also says "vamos" seventeen times, at twelve times the rate of anyone else. Radio is officially conducted in English. Nobody told the enthusiasm.
What each driver's radio actually sounds like
Names aside, the same method shows which ordinary words each driver reaches for far more than the rest of the grid. Some of it is exactly what you would expect from watching them:
Driver
Word
Uses
Rate vs everyone else
Max Verstappen
unbelievable
83
6.7x
Max Verstappen
lovely
32
7.0x
Lewis Hamilton
grateful
16
11.5x
Lando Norris
beautiful
15
11.0x
George Russell
deceleration
12
10.9x
Charles Leclerc
anyway
49
4.9x
Kevin Magnussen
understood
22
4.3x
Caption: Words spoken by the driver, measured against the rate across all drivers in the archive.
Verstappen saying "unbelievable" eighty three times is the one that needs no explanation. Russell reaching for "deceleration" while everyone else says "braking" is an engineering degree showing through. And Hamilton's most distinctive word being "grateful" is not what most people would guess about a driver with that reputation for radio arguments.
A caution on this table. The method finds words that are statistically unusual, not words that are meaningful, and plenty of what it surfaces is noise: transcription quirks, a phrase from one long message, a word that happens to cluster. We have listed only entries where the count is high enough and the word is one a person would recognise as characteristic. Others in the same output are not worth the paper.
Engineer changes are announced quietly, usually in a paragraph nobody reads, and then you hear a different voice on Friday.
The Formula Dream app carries live driver radio as it is broadcast, with the transcript running alongside it and the driver and engineer colour coded, so the voice and the words arrive together. It also runs a live Dashboard through every session, currently in beta, with every car on the circuit map and a timing tower showing lap times, gaps, intervals, tyre compound and age, plus every FIA document of the weekend as the stewards publish it.
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Peter Bonnington, Lewis Hamilton's race engineer at Mercedes from 2013, through six world championships. He did not move to Ferrari with Hamilton and remains at Mercedes. Hamilton addresses him as "Bono" sixteen times in our archive.
Who is Carlos Sainz's race engineer?
At Ferrari from 2021 to 2024 it was Riccardo Adami, whom Sainz addresses as "Ricky" on the radio twenty times in that period and never once before it. Adami later engineered Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari.
Who is GP in F1 team radio?
Gianpiero Lambiase, Max Verstappen's race engineer at Red Bull. Verstappen uses the initials rather than the name, which is why they survive transcription.
Do F1 drivers call their race engineer by name?
Constantly. It is one of the more reliable signals in a radio archive, and it is how a change of engineer becomes visible in the data before anyone reads a press release.
What word does Max Verstappen say most on the radio?
Relative to the rest of the grid, "unbelievable", 83 times across the archive at 6.7 times the rate of other drivers, followed closely by "lovely".
All counts were measured from our own archive of transcribed broadcast team radio covering the 2018 to 2026 seasons, using driver-spoken lines only. Coverage is not even across those years and 2022 is absent.
Every F1 circuit has its own vocabulary, and we measured it
Drivers at Monaco say tunnel twenty two times more often than drivers anywhere else. Shanghai says holes. Austria says deleted. Every circuit leaves a fingerprint in the radio.
