Verstappen Gets a New Voice in Austin — Hart's Three-Race Test Starts Now
GOATIFYMax Verstappen will hear a different voice over his Red Bull radio at this weekend's United States Grand Prix. Tom Hart, a long-serving member of the Dutchman's engineering group, is taking the race-engineer seat in Austin while Gianpiero Lambiase begins a carefully managed transition away from the role he has held since 2016. The switch is scheduled for three of the final six Grands Prix, not an immediate departure for the engineer known to fans as 'GP'.
The timing makes this more than a personnel announcement. Verstappen has just won consecutive races in Malaysia and Singapore, and Red Bull has recovered enough pace to make the final stretch of 2026 meaningful. A team fighting for every position cannot afford confused instructions or a slow exchange between driver and pit wall. Hart must prove that familiarity developed in engineering meetings can become decisive communication at racing speed.
Red Bull's plan gives the incoming engineer several real race weekends before Lambiase's eventual move to McLaren. It also gives Verstappen a chance to establish a new working rhythm without losing access to the experienced voice that helped shape four world championships.
Austin Starts a Three-Race Handover — Not an Abrupt Goodbye
Under the reported plan, Hart will be Verstappen's race engineer at the United States, São Paulo and Las Vegas Grands Prix. Lambiase is expected to resume the familiar race-engineer duties in Mexico City, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Those assignments deliberately alternate rather than drawing a clean line after Austin. They allow the team to expose Hart to different circuits and race conditions while retaining a proven fallback before the season ends.
Crucially, Lambiase is not simply disappearing from the Red Bull garage during Hart's weekends. He is due to attend the three races in his broader capacity as head of racing. That means the incoming engineer can take charge of direct communication with the driver while the outgoing one remains within the team's senior operational structure. It is a transition in the most visible seat on the pit wall, not an announcement that every decision-making responsibility has already changed hands.
Why divide the races this way? A race engineer must do more than relay instructions. The job involves translating complex information into a small number of useful words when the car is approaching a braking zone at racing speed. A driver may be balancing tyre temperatures, battery energy, traffic and a possible pit stop simultaneously. The engineer has to know what information matters now, what can wait and when to stop talking. Even an experienced performance engineer needs real race mileage to perfect that timing.
Austin is a demanding opening test because Circuit of the Americas combines fast changes of direction, slow traction zones and a long back straight. A promising setup on Friday can still expose tyre or balance problems over a long Sunday stint. Hart's task is to create a calm, consistent communication channel across the entire weekend, not merely sound confident in practice. Red Bull will be measuring the quality of the exchange as closely as any single result.
Why Red Bull Chose Tom Hart Instead of Starting From Scratch
Hart is new to the lead radio role, but he is not new to the organisation or the driver. He first joined Red Bull as an industrial-placement student in 2012. He later moved into simulator performance work, spending years on the correlation between virtual testing and what the real car did on circuit. In 2020 he became a performance engineer and established himself within the group working alongside Verstappen and Lambiase.
That background matters because race engineering is built on a shared language. A driver who reports that the rear of the car is moving in a particular phase of a corner does not have time to deliver a technical essay. The engineer must understand the shorthand, connect it with telemetry and decide whether the answer is a driving adjustment, a setup change for the next session or a strategy compromise. Hart already knows much of Verstappen's vocabulary and has worked within the same problem-solving process.
The succession almost went in another direction. Hart had been lined up for a senior role with Williams alongside Alex Albon, but Red Bull retained him when Lambiase's future move to McLaren created an opening. Keeping a trusted internal engineer prevented the team from losing another experienced member of the operation at the precise moment it needed continuity. It also avoided asking Verstappen to build an entirely new relationship with an engineer arriving from another team.
Hart's experience extends beyond one driver. During 2026 he has worked across Red Bull's performance group while Isack Hadjar has joined Verstappen in the second car. That wider exposure should help him understand how the same RB22 responds to different driving styles and conditions. It does not guarantee instant chemistry over the radio, but it provides a stronger starting point than a purely external appointment. The team is promoting someone who has already seen how its race weekends work from the inside.
The Real Test Is the Call Verstappen Needs Before He Asks
The most important exchanges between a driver and race engineer often sound unremarkable. A brief warning about traffic can protect a qualifying lap. An accurate tyre-temperature update can change how aggressively a driver attacks the next corner. A clear instruction about battery deployment can decide whether an overtake is completed or defended. These are not isolated commands; they are the audible end of an entire network of engineers analysing the car in real time.
Verstappen and Lambiase have spent a decade developing a direct style that can include sharp disagreements. That relationship has survived championship pressure, difficult strategy calls and moments when the car has not behaved as expected. Hart does not need to imitate Lambiase's personality. He needs to earn the same confidence that the information is reliable and that the driver can act on it immediately. In a competitive race, hesitation can be more expensive than an imperfect sentence.
The recent Singapore Grand Prix illustrated how resilient a team must be when communication is disrupted. Verstappen won the race despite radio problems that forced Red Bull to improvise with pit-board messages. That episode was a reminder that communication systems can fail even when the driver and engineer know each other exceptionally well. With Hart in the lead role, the team will be watching whether information still reaches Verstappen efficiently when a plan changes or an unexpected safety-car window appears.
Results alone would be a poor way to judge the handover. Verstappen might win in Austin because the RB22 is fast, or finish outside the podium because of a mechanical issue unrelated to the radio. Better indicators include clean qualifying preparation, timely strategy calls, effective management of tyre degradation and a lack of avoidable misunderstandings. The objective is to build a process that remains dependable when Red Bull is chasing a rival and when it is defending a fragile lead.
Lambiase's McLaren Move Makes the 2027 Plan Bigger Than One Headset
Lambiase has been Verstappen's principal race engineer since the Dutchman joined Red Bull in 2016. Together they built one of Formula 1's defining driver-engineer partnerships, including four drivers' championships. His eventual move to McLaren is therefore more consequential than the loss of a familiar voice. Red Bull is preparing to replace a senior operator who understands its strategy, its driver and the way its departments interact during a race weekend.
McLaren has announced that Lambiase will join in a senior chief-racing-officer role no later than 2028, with the possibility of an earlier start dependent on the eventual transition arrangements. That is different from simply hiring him to engineer Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri on the radio. The value of the appointment lies in broader race operations and leadership experience, not a presumed change in which engineer talks to which driver at McLaren.
Red Bull is separating those responsibilities in its own succession plan. Hart is being prepared to become Verstappen's full-time race engineer, while former Aston Martin figure Tom McCullough has been lined up for a senior head-of-racing role in 2027. The division makes sense: a direct driver-engineer relationship requires daily trust and detailed technical familiarity, whereas overseeing a race organisation involves coordination across strategy, engineering and operations. One person previously covered both areas, but the team does not have to recreate the old job description exactly.
That creates a delicate balance through the end of 2026. Lambiase remains valuable to Red Bull's current campaign, yet the team must prepare for a future in which he works for a direct rival. Hart's three trial weekends offer a controlled way to move practical knowledge into the next generation of the operation. The challenge is not to erase the past. It is to preserve the habits that made the Verstappen-Lambiase partnership effective while giving Hart enough authority to develop a partnership of his own.
The Austin weekend will offer the first sustained public evidence of how Verstappen and Hart function together when every instruction counts. The two later trial races, in São Paulo and Las Vegas, should show whether the communication is repeatable across different track types rather than just successful once.
If Red Bull completes those weekends with clear calls, sensible responses to changing conditions and a driver who trusts the information in his ear, the handover will have achieved its purpose. Lambiase's eventual departure will still be significant, but it need not mean Red Bull has to relearn how to run Verstappen's side of the garage from zero.
