Hamilton dismisses talk of frustration with Ferrari

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SHANGHAI (AP) — Lewis Hamilton denied there’s frustration with Ferrari race engineer Ricciardo Adami despite frequently shutting down unnecessary radio chatter between them at the Australian Grand Prix.

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“Everyone overreacted,” Hamilton said on Thursday.

Hamilton had a miserable debut weekend for Ferrari in Melbourne last week after qualifying eighth and finishing 10th for the final point. That ended preseason testing hype that had the Scuderia as a potential McLaren challenger.

The Brit dismissed talk he was further annoyed by the team’s operations at Albert Park, including a strategic gamble that cost him a potential win and led to an angry rebuke over radio. That was along with unnecessary radio chatter from his race engineer that he had to swat away.

“I was very polite in how I suggested it, I said, ‘Leave it to me please,”‘ Hamilton said. “I wasn’t swearing. It was just at that point I was really struggling with a car and I needed full focus on at least a couple of things.”

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Hamilton backed his veteran teammate Adami, who previously engineered Carlos Sainz Jr., now at Williams, and retired four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel, saying all that was needed was a constructive chat post-race.

“Afterwards,” Hamilon said, “I was like, ‘Hey bro, I don’t need that bit of information but if you want to give me this, this is the place I’d like to do it. This is how I’m feeling in the car and at these points, this is the point I do and don’t need the information.’

“That’s what it’s about. There’s no issues in it. It’s done with a smiley face, and we move forward.”

He added his recent radio chatter pales in comparison with F1 rivals, including at Red Bull between Max Verstappen and his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase.

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“Go and listen to the radio calls with others and their engineers — far worse,” Hamilton said.

“The conversation that Max has with an engineer over the years, the abuse that the poor guy’s taken and you never write about it, but you wrote about the smallest little discussion I had with mine.”

Hamilton remains impressively oblivious to the pressure of joining F1’s most successful team, with the seven-time world champion taking the setbacks in his stride.

“It (Australia) wasn’t the race that we wanted but it’s not the moment to throw the toys out of the pram, like, it is what it is,” he said.

“One small thing could have made a big difference in the result but we move forwards. Everyone is still motivated. You’ve got everyone here with their heads higher and I think that the energy’s still good in the garage, so we’re not defined by that one race.”

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