With Lewis Hamilton moving to Ferrari in 2025, there have also been reports that the Briton may also take some of the high-profile names from Mercedes beside him to Maranello. This includes his close confidantes among the engineering staff at the Silver Arrows. However, a report from Motorsport Italia has revealed that there is a non-poaching clause in his contract. This clause prevents Hamilton from taking any engineers with him in case of his termination or exit from the team.
The report states that the #44 driver is “expressly prohibited by contact from even proposing to his current collaborators to follow him towards Maranello starting from 2025”. According to the rumors, Peter Bonnington and Andrew Shovlin were the two names in contention to accompany Hamilton to Ferrari.
However, Bonnington (Bono), his race engineer is not keen as of yet to move to the Italian team. There has been a lot of media and fan speculation on whether Bono will leave or not. Given he has developed a great sense of camaraderie with Hamilton, it seems odd for him to not be beside the Briton.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has stated that they will discuss Bonnington’s future amid Hamilton’s big switch to Ferrari. However, Wolff has cited some factors like the contractual obligation of gardening leave. Moreover, with Bono probably not wishing to relocate to Italy, it may complicate this situation and the eventual decision.
Regardless, it is not uncommon to see race engineers and key engineering personnel move with a star driver to their new F1 team. Sometimes, it happens, and otherwise, the non-poaching clause prevents such kind of attrition besides the driver.
Before Lewis Hamilton, which other driver moves have caused an engineer to move too?
In Fernando Alonso’s case, he got lucky as Andrea Stella moved with him from Ferrari to McLaren in 2015 due to no such clause in his contract. Stella had served as the engineer for Michael Schumacher and Kimi Raikkonen before Alonso came to the Prancing Horse.
After the Spaniard retired in 2018, the Italian engineer stayed put at Woking and became the performance director. After a big shift in team principals at the end of 2022, Stella became the team boss at McLaren. So, certainly moving with Alonso helped his career to progress as well.
On the other hand, Sebastian Vettel did not get the chance to take his then-engineer Guillaume “Rocky” Rocquellin when he moved from Red Bull to Ferrari. Vettel’s contract had a non-poaching clause that prohibited him from taking any engineering staff with him.
Rocky was one of the best engineers Vettel had and was his race engineer during his dominant run from 2010 to 2013. The Frenchman had been a race engineer for David Coulthard during the early Red Bull days, before Vettel. Post that, in 2015, Rocky got a promotion to become the Head of Race Engineering at the Milton Keynes team.
