While Lewis Hamilton is set to leave Mercedes, his race engineer Peter 'Bono' Bonnington will not accompany the seven-time world champion to Ferrari.
A spokesperson for Mercedes has verified reports that Bonnington, who has been Hamilton's race engineer for nearly his entire decade-long tenure at Mercedes, will continue with the team.
Bonnington, aged 49, will not only continue his role as a race engineer in 2025 and beyond, but will also advance to a senior role - taking on the responsibilities as the head of race engineering.
Regarding Hamilton's transition, Ferrari could opt for the straightforward approach of reassigning Carlos Sainz's current race engineer, Riccardo Adami, to their new driver starting in 2025.
Additionally, Jock Clear, a renowned F1 race engineer who previously worked closely with 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve, now serves at Ferrari as the head of their driver academy.
"If he (Hamilton) ended up working with Jock Clear, who he's won with before, that would be an easy ball to get rolling," Villeneuve mentioned to Prime Casino, highlighting Clear's previous stint on Hamilton's engineering team in 2013 and 2014 before the move to Maranello.
Nevertheless, Villeneuve acknowledged that not working with Bonnington next season could be a minor setback for the 39-year-old Hamilton.
"Yeah, but even an engineer moving team needs to figure out how things work," he commented. "He (Hamilton) has won with different engineers. He's won championships with different engineers. It will also depend on who he gets at Ferrari.
"But it's a paramount relationship because this is the one point of contact and trust for the driver and vice versa. This relationship is something that is built over time and sometimes it just never works out. You can have the best engineer with the best driver and it won't work out - the chemistry won't happen, that trust level won't get into place, and you'll never get the results," Villeneuve explained.
