F1 Race Engineer Salaries

A race engineer in F1 makes a base salary of £100k-180k ($133k-239k) on our figures, and a 10% to 30% bonus would take that to £110k-234k ($146k-310k). Seventeen of the 25 engineers on this page sit in that band, including the engineers of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc.

Extra responsibility is what moves the number. Chief race engineers earn £180k-350k ($239k-464k), and Peter Bonnington and Lambiase earn more again because they run their team’s race engineering or racing operation.

Peter Bonnington spent 12 seasons on Lewis Hamilton’s radio at Mercedes, which made him the best-known race engineer in F1. He now engineers Kimi Antonelli and heads the team’s race engineering department as well.

That second job lifts his base salary to £250k-600k ($331k-795k) on our figures, well above the band for engineers who look after one car.

Lambiase is the best paid, on £350k-800k ($464k-1.1m) as Max Verstappen’s engineer and Red Bull’s Head of Racing, and he’s due to join McLaren by 2028. Bonnington is second.

McLaren’s Will Joseph and Tom Stallard follow on £200k-450k ($265k-596k), because both combine a car with a senior department role.

The gap inside one job title is big. Lambiase and Bonnington can earn up to £800k ($1.1m) and £600k ($795k) in base salary, while Carlo Santi and Marcus Dudley, who engineer Hamilton and George Russell, top out at £180k ($239k).

The driver doesn’t change the band. What separates the top two is the department they run on top of a car, along with the years they’ve put in. Santi only moved onto Hamilton’s car in 2026.

No race engineer on the 2026 grid has a credible published net worth. They’re salaried staff with no stakes in their teams, and the figures that circulate online for Bonnington and Lambiase don’t show where they come from.

The contrast with the drivers is stark. George Russell‘s base salary is a reported $34m, about 140 times the top of Dudley’s band, even though the two of them work together on the same car every race weekend.

A race engineer is the driver’s main contact at the track. They run the car’s setup, plan each practice session, turn the driver’s feedback into changes and talk to them on the radio during the race, with performance engineers and strategists feeding in data.

Most arrive with a mechanical or aeronautical engineering degree and spend years as performance engineers before getting a car of their own. For where junior engineers start, see our F1 engineer salaries guide.