F1 Rumor: Red Bull to poach Hamilton’s engineer Bono

With Lewis Hamilton announcing that he will be leaving the Mercedes F1 team after the 2024, rumors are swirling that Hamilton’s Race Engineer may leave too.

–by Mark Cipolloni–

While Hamilton fans hope he goes with Hamilton to Ferrari, Peter Bonnington (called Bono) is British, and he is not keen on moving to Italy and learning the Italian language. And his girlfriend in British and they are close.

In his current role as senior race engineer, he is responsible for all trackside communications to Hamilton and the set-up of the Formula One car. During his time in this position, he has engineered Hamilton to six of his seven world championships and is widely regarded as being one of the most skilled race engineers in Formula One.

Seen together last week were Red Bull Boss Christian Horner, his wife Geri Halliwell and Bono at the Royal Artillery Hunt Point-to-Point races.

It has been reported that Bono’s girlfriend was participating at that event and she is part of Geri’s Horse Crew.

Rumors have begun to swell that Horner would like to hire Bono to be race engineer for Sergio Perez’s car to help that side of the garage. And if Daniel Ricciardo gets promoted to the Red Bull team in 2025, Bono would become his Race Engineer.

If this were to happen, and with Gianpiero Lambiase as Max Verstappen’s race engineer, Red Bull would have the two best Race Engineers in the F1 paddock.

It’s actually wild how fast Mercedes unraveled once they weren’t 50hp faster than everyone else.