Lewis Hamilton has hit back at media making too much of his radio exchanges with his new Ferrari race engineer during his Scuderia debut in Australia, suggesting "far worse" comments by Max Verstappen went unnoticed.
Hamilton endured a difficult Ferrari debut in Melbourne, with the team struggling for performance in both dry qualifying conditions and in a mixed-weather race, and taking wrong strategy calls that prevented either Hamilton or team-mate Charles Leclerc from finishing higher than 10th and eighth respectively.
The seven-time world champion's initial lack of chemistry with his new race engineer Riccardo Adami became a talking point as some of their radio exchanges trickled into the TV broadcast. Early on, Hamilton politely but curtly asked the Italian to "leave me to it please” and not to repeat instructions so much, along with a few other soundbites that made it into the broadcast.
Listening back to their entire exchange throughout the race, Hamilton and Adami were otherwise working together just fine for large spells of the contest.
As quoted by Sky Sports F1 ahead of this weekend's Chinese Grand Prix, Hamilton felt the media had made too much from those exchanges: "Naturally, everyone overegged. It was literally just a back and forth."
"I was very polite in how I had suggested it. I said: 'Leave it to me, please'. I wasn't saying 'f*** you'. I wasn't swearing. At that point I was really struggling with the car, and I needed full focus on this couple of things. We're getting to know each other. He's obviously had two champions or more in the past and there's no issues between us still."
Hamilton suggested there were double standards at play because he felt Verstappen's fiery radio messages at his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase didn't tend to receive the same coverage.
"Go and listen to the radio calls with others and their engineers – far worse," he 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.
"Ultimately, we're literally just getting to know each other, so afterwards I'm 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 when I do and don't need the information.' That's what it's about. There are no issues, it's done with a smiley face and we move forwards."
Hamilton's point can be argued, as Verstappen did receive a lot of flak for his outburst against Lambiase during last year's Hungarian Grand Prix.
At the time Verstappen grew increasingly frustrated by his team's poor strategy on one of his worst afternoons of the year, telling Lambiase: "No mate, don't give me that bull**** now. You guys gave me this f****** strategy, okay? I'm trying to rescue what's left. F*** sake." The pair cleared the air the following week in the Spa-Francorchamps paddock.
Hamilton's new engineer Adami, who previously worked with the likes of Carlos Sainz and four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel, faces a difficult balancing exercise while he and Hamilton get used to each other's style of working.
On one hand Hamilton does need more instructions and reminders as he gets up to speed at a completely different team compared to his familiar Mercedes surroundings, but the pair will now work on tightening up their communications to suit Hamilton.
