26/05/2025
NEWS STORY
Fans left mystified as seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton asks his engineer "are you upset with me" in latest exchange.
It was a "miserable" Monaco for Hamilton, but more of that later, for the talk at the end of the 78 lap race was the Briton's latest exchange with engineer Riccardo Adami.
In the closing stages of the race, following a brief period of silence from Adami, with whom there have been numerous exchanges over the course of the season, Hamilton asked: "Are you upset with me or something?"
There was no response.
Previously, Hamilton had called on Adami to give him targets to push for as he felt he was essentially in no man's land in fifth, unaware how far he was behind the leaders but comfortably ahead of the nearest opposition.
"Push now," Adami had told him. "This is our race."
This had led Hamilton to believe that Max Verstappen, who was yet to stop, was catchable, though he clearly wasn't.
"It wasn't very clear. The information wasn't exactly that clear," said Hamilton at race end. "I didn't fully understand 'this is our race'," he admitted. "I didn't know what I was fighting for. Was I fighting for the next spot ahead?
"In actual fact when I looked at the data I was nowhere near any of the guys up front. I used up my tyres a lot in that moment but I was so far away from them anyway.
"I can't comment on the rest of the race. For me I was kind of in the middle of nowhere. With the penalty that I had I started seventh. I was obviously behind two cars for some time and managed to clear them. I was just in no man's land after that. The gap was relatively big and I was really not racing them. I needed a Safety Car to come into play but it didn't happen. It was pretty straight forward from there."
"When the driver is asking something between Turn 1 and Turn 3 we have to wait to reply to avoid to speak during the corners," explained Fred Vasseur, keen to play down any talk of a rift between Hamilton and Adami.
"It's not that we are sleeping, it's not that we are having a beer on the pit wall," he added. "It's just because we have a section of the track where we agreed before to speak with the drivers.
"Honestly it's not a tension that a guy is asking something," he insisted. "He is between the walls, he is under pressure, he's at 300 kph between the walls and I am perfectly fine with it. When I spoke to him after the race he was not upset."
Asked if he'd enjoyed the race, Hamilton replied: "No, it was miserable.
"The races here are generally," he added, "unless you're first and in the lead.
"Even when you're in the lead, it's not that fun," he admitted. "Just a nice reward at the end but other than that, anything but first is kind of empty.
"From where I was, with a three-place grid penalty, moving forwards back to fifth I think was decent, the best I could do."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Monaco here.