Verstappen Gets a New Voice in Austin as Hart Takes Over From Lambiase at Three Races

Max Verstappen will start the run-in to the Formula 1 season with a different voice in his ear. Tom Hart, who becomes his race engineer full-time from 2027, takes the radio for the United States Grand Prix in Austin next weekend and for the Brazil and Las Vegas rounds after it, while Gianpiero Lambiase, the engineer behind all four of Verstappen’s titles, steps back to his head of racing duties at those events before returning for Mexico, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

Why is Red Bull changing Verstappen’s engineer mid-season?

Because Lambiase is leaving, and the team would rather rehearse the replacement than improvise him. Lambiase joins McLaren as chief racing officer, a move announced earlier this year, PlanetF1 reports, and 2026 is his last season on Verstappen’s pit wall. Hart already stood in during practice at Monza last month as part of the handover, and Red Bull has now confirmed the race-weekend version of the plan, Crash and Autosport report. Lambiase will still be at the circuit for all three of Hart’s rounds, which makes the experiment reversible in a way a clean break would not be.

Who is Tom Hart, and why did Williams lose him?

A senior member of Verstappen’s own engineering group who was supposed to be somebody else’s engineer by now. Crash reports Hart had been due to join Williams to work with Alex Albon, but stayed after Lambiase’s departure opened the seat and Verstappen expressed him as his preference. RacingNews365 reports Red Bull did the work to reverse the Williams move once the Lambiase exit was announced in April. The detail matters because it frames the appointment as the driver’s choice, not a default promotion, and Verstappen’s radio relationship is the most scrutinised in the sport.

What is actually being handed over?

The second most successful pairing the sport has had. RacingNews365 puts Lambiase and Verstappen at 73 wins and four world titles since 2016, behind only Lewis Hamilton and Peter Bonnington at Mercedes. The radio is where that partnership lives in public, which is why the timing has a poetic awkwardness the desk has already met in Singapore: Hamilton apologised for a strategy call he made himself in Singapore, Verstappen kept a sprint pole through a yellow-flag inquiry, and the Singapore weekend also produced the stewards’ queue that ran through the record nine-retirement sprint. In the main race, Verstappen and Lambiase’s radio failed so badly that his messages were largely inaudible, and he joked that his engineer might have enjoyed the silence, PlanetF1 reports.

Why did Lambiase end up on the Singapore podium?

As a goodbye the team arranged before the handover became public. Red Bull sent Lambiase up to collect the constructors’ trophy after Verstappen’s first Singapore win, and Verstappen said the gesture surprised him, Crash reports, recalling that Lambiase had told him in Las Vegas last year that a podium might be his last. Read against this week’s news, the podium was the public start of a farewell tour that now has a published itinerary: three races watching his successor do his job, then three final races doing it himself, ending in Abu Dhabi.

What happens next in Austin?

Hart runs the full weekend, and the championship context is not gentle. Verstappen is fighting for second in the drivers’ standings while Kimi Antonelli’s title arithmetic in Austin dominates the other end of the paddock, and Mercedes is still fending off the favouritism noise that made Toto Wolff call the claims brainless a fortnight ago. A new engineer usually costs a driver a few tenths in procedure alone: pit calls, tyre language, the shorthand built over a decade. Red Bull is spending three low-risk weekends now to avoid paying that price in a title fight later, and Mexico, where Lambiase resumes, is the control test that shows whether the voice actually mattered.