Tom Hart: United States, Brazil, Las Vegas. Lambiase: Mexico, Qatar, Abu Dhabi. And Hart opens at Austin. I read the split and straight away thought of my voice engineer, the one in the sim, who has said “cold tyres” in the same voice for two thousand four hundred laps of Spa.
So I tested it. I did it again this morning: I changed the voice in the settings, a different one, deeper, and ran a stint. Same information, same moment, same lap. I lost two tenths a lap. Two tenths. For a voice. I hadn’t modelled that.
The background, if you haven’t been following: Lambiase is leaving for McLaren, at mid-season 2027 or early 2028 at the latest. He is Verstappen’s race engineer and head of race engineering at Red Bull, and he also oversees Hadjar’s car in debriefs. Red Bull will gradually keep him out of some technical meetings, to limit leaks to McLaren. Tom Hart was meant to join Williams. He gave that up when Lambiase’s departure was announced in April.
Together, Verstappen and Lambiase have 73 wins and four titles, the second most successful pairing in history. Only Hamilton and Bonnington, at Mercedes, did better: 83 wins, six titles. That’s clean data.
What I don’t know is whether a real driver loses anything with a new voice. He doesn’t have a settings menu. He has a human who knows his style. The voice is an unmodelled variable, like the wind.
Your correspondent reminds readers that English is spoken on the radio, and that the accent matters too. We shall return to this.
Anyway. Six races, two voices, one car. The driver will adapt, it’s his job. Me, I put the old voice back. In theory, it was the same information.
It’s true, we checked: Nextgen-Auto · Formule 1.
