It was at Monza in September 2023, home to Formula One’s Italian Grand Prix, that the significance of Ferrari truly struck Fred Vasseur, the recently installed team principal of the scuderia.
All weekend long he’d been stopped for photos and autographs, far more than normal. From his perch on the Ferrari pit wall, he’d seen the fan clubs in the grandstands keeping close watch of the red cars. Post-race, he saw thousands of fans flooding the main straight to congregate under the podium. They unfurled their prancing horse emblazoned flags, cheering and chanting in an explosion of noise and color, all in honor of Carlos Sainz’s third-place finish.
In Italy, Ferrari isn’t just a Formula One team. It’s a source of national pride. For the loyal tifosi fandom, Monza is a site of pilgrimage.
“You realize in Monza the expectation, the atmosphere,” Vasseur said. “You say, ‘OK guys, now we need to give back something.’”
Vasseur has been at the helm of Ferrari, F1’s most successful, famous team, since January 2023. He knew what he was signing up for when he took the job. His task is to end a 15-year championship drought and return Ferrari to its glory days as an F1 force.
His project is highlighted by the team’s blockbuster signing of seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton for 2025 —and one that goes far beyond one name on the marquee.
“You need to keep the mindset everywhere, in every single employee, that we have to do a better job tomorrow,” Vasseur said, sitting in his office within Ferrari’s motorhome during the Canadian Grand Prix weekend in June. “It’s the only way to improve. It will be a continuous improvement. We have to continue to change things everywhere.”
Vasseur does not have any particular memories of the first time he walked through the gates of the Maranello factory, home to Ferrari for more than 80 years, as team principal.
He’d been there dozens of times, mostly while helming of the Alfa Romeo team, which used Ferrari engines. Just because he was now the man in charge did not bring any shift in feeling. He had too much work to do.
“It was something like three weeks before the launch, and four weeks before the first test day,” Vasseur recalled. “It was a rush from day one. Honestly, I was not too emotional.”
Vasseur took over a Ferrari team coming off a mixed 2022. Thanks to a strong start, the team won four races and Charles Leclerc finished as runner-up to Max Verstappen in the drivers’ championship. But its failure to sustain its early year challenge to Red Bull, plus some noteworthy strategy miscues and pit stop slip-ups, made for a season of frustration. Second wasn’t enough to save leader Mattia Binotto’s job, prompting Ferrari’s senior management to turn to Vasseur.
“You realize in Monza the expectation, the atmosphere,” Fred Vasseur said. “You say, ‘OK guys, now we need to give back something.’” (Arthur Thill ATPImages / Getty Images)
Vasseur, who had spent the previous five years running Alfa Romeo (now once again known as Sauber), never wanted to come into Ferrari and make a swathe of changes immediately. “You have to join with humility,” he said. “You can’t arrive somewhere and say, ‘OK I will change this, this, this, this.’ It took time for me to understand the process.” He leaned on Ferrari’s then-sporting director and his friend of 30 years, Laurent Mekies (now team principal at RB), for advice as he evaluated potential changes.
A big focus was the mentality and culture of the team. Those within Ferrari, including Vasseur, declined to draw comparisons between the present and how things ran under Binotto. But Vasseur saw the need to empower people to take risks, following an example he felt Red Bull had set, and made clear that he would be the one to bear the consequences.
“I felt the team somehow (was) a bit conservative,” Vasseur said. “When you are four-tenths or five-tenths (of a second per lap) behind Red Bull, it’s not that Red Bull have the magic bullet of five-tenths and it’s there. It’s that on 10 topics, perhaps they are half a tenth faster than you.
“If you push a little bit the boundaries and say ‘Let’s take a bit more risk,’ or be a bit more aggressive, you put the team in the mentality to do it.” The culture of risk assessment changes. “It means that you need to be used to being at the limit.”
A home Grand Prix needs a home movie 📹
Memories from our Monza weekend 🥹#ItalianGP 🇮🇹 pic.twitter.com/NaOAeNJRdJ
— Scuderia Ferrari HP (@ScuderiaFerrari) September 7, 2023
That empowerment has stretched across all departments, allowing for upgrade packages to arrive at a track multiple races ahead of schedule. Leclerc is impressed by how things have shifted, saying the team was “not losing time in taking decisions” to try to improve the car.
“Sometimes you’ve got to be brave and go in a direction, and we are all convinced it might be the right one, but it might be a risky one,” Leclerc said. “In the past, we were a bit safer on those things.” Working on development paths with confidence the planned upgrades will work and using them as a foundation, rather than taking a ‘wait-and-see’ approach, signals a more aggressive Ferrari.
Vasseur is pleased by the cultural change, and especially the buy-in from the thousand-plus employees of Ferrari’s F1 team. “Each time that we are focused on something, we are able to improve,” he said. “The pit stops were a drama two years ago. They did 2,000 pit stops during the winter. We went back, and we’re in good shape.” Ferrari went from being the fourth-fastest team in the pits to the second-fastest within a year, now trailing only Red Bull. Vasseur said 2023 Ferrari “lost too many points for lack of opportunism” but had now “made a huge step forward on this.”
Meanwhile, Vasseur has stepped up Ferrari’s efforts to bring more talent into the changed culture. He wouldn’t put a number on the scale of the growth, but said the team has “recruited a lot,” believing the headcount in some departments was “weak” compared to other teams.
“We have a lot of people who are joining or have joined the team in the last couple of weeks or months,” he said. “It’s a good feeling.”
This includes two big hires from Mercedes in Jerome d’Ambrosio, who will become deputy team principal, and Loic Serra as head of chassis performance engineering, both starting in October. Vasseur believes the new arrivals were “convinced” by Ferrari’s direction.
But out of all the signings, none are as significant as Hamilton.
His signing was a bombshell moment, not only for Ferrari, but also F1. In the history of the sport, never has there been such an unexpected or big-name driver switch.
It was a statement of intent from Ferrari to lure Hamilton away from Mercedes, the team with whom he’d built his legacy and intended to see out his career. The promise of a multi-year contract that would take him beyond his 40th birthday gave Hamilton security that Mercedes wouldn’t offer, while his Ferrari contract is also understood to be more lucrative than his previous terms.
Hamilton spoke in the weeks after the announcement on Feb. 1 about his childhood interest in and love of Ferrari, how he’d always play as the red car on the F1 video games and wondered what it must be like to pull on that iconic race suit. The allure of Ferrari cannot be matched. But Hamilton isn’t joining purely for the experience. He still badly wants to win a record-breaking eighth world championship, and believes he can do it with Ferrari.
Vasseur played a main role in signing Hamilton. The pair have known each other for more than 20 years. Hamilton raced for Vasseur’s ART Grand Prix team when he was in GP2 (now Formula Two) en route to F1. They remained friendly but didn’t expect to reunite — until they did.
Fred Vasseur has known Lewis Hamilton since the driver was in GP2, on his way to F1 greatness. (Formula 1/Formula Motorsport Limited via Getty Images)
Vasseur said Hamilton’s arrival would be part of the growing momentum at Maranello, not only because of his on-track capabilities. “It’s not just about the speed into the car or whatever,” Vasseur said. “It’s a mindset, a commitment. It’s a huge push for the team.” He thought it sent “a huge message also for the recruitment, for the sponsors” of Ferrari. In May, the team signed a title sponsorship deal with computing giant HP that is thought to be one of the biggest financial agreements on the grid.
Is that part of the Lewis Hamilton effect? Vasseur said it is difficult to tell. “But the positive dynamic is there,” he said. “It’s like a snowball.”
Even as Hamilton’s final season with Mercedes picks up thanks to its on-track improvements, allowing for his first win in over two years, at Silverstone, he’s looking ahead to his next chapter with Ferrari. He talks to Ferrari president John Elkann most weeks about their off-track plans. After all, with Hamilton, Ferrari is getting far more than an elite-level racing driver.
“(We’re) just talking about fashion, and things that we want to do,” Hamilton said. He speaks frequently with Leclerc as well, but all racing-focused conversations will have to wait until Hamilton officially joins. Until the checkered flag is shown at the season finale in Abu Dhabi in November, Hamilton and Ferrari know they are rivals.
With Leclerc also locked in for the long-term after signing a new contract in January, Vasseur has a claim to the strongest driver lineup on the grid. But he is eager to highlight the outgoing Sainz’s role as “part of the recovery of the team last year.” Sainz was the only non-Red Bull driver to win a race last year, and scored Ferrari’s first victory of 2024 in Australia after capitalizing on Verstappen’s retirement. “He always had a positive input into the team, and this helped us a lot,” said Vasseur
Like with Hamilton, Vasseur goes way back with Leclerc, over a decade to his days in go-karting. Leclerc raced for ART in F2, and debuted in F1 with Sauber when Vasseur was in charge. It has allowed for a rare, human connection in F1. “If we just look at each other, we know (what is) the feeling,” Vasseur said.
“He still has the same characteristic, to blame himself first. For this, he didn’t change. But overall, I think he is on the trajectory I saw in the past. He’s doing a mega good job in the car, and in terms of motivation and the collaboration with everybody. We can’t complain.”
Ferrari’s momentum hasn’t been a purely forward-moving affair, however. After Leclerc’s domination of the Monaco Grand Prix at the end of May, winning from pole position and leading every single lap, Ferrari seemed to have the momentum to bridge the gap to Red Bull. Since then, it has gone backward.
Its recent efforts to improve the car have revived the bouncing problem that all teams encountered in 2022, leaving Leclerc and Sainz lacking confidence at times. In the five races since Monaco, they’ve together scored just one podium finish — Sainz was third in Austria, only after Verstappen’s clash with Lando Norris allowed him to move up. Meanwhile Mercedes and McLaren have scored wins after surging ahead in the competitive order.
After this month’s British Grand Prix, Leclerc described the recent run as “worse than a nightmare.” The result in Monaco looks increasingly like an outlier rather than a sign of things to come through the rest of this year, barring a rapid response.
Since Charles Leclerc’s win at Monaco, Ferrari’s progress has stalled. (Jayce Illman/ Getty Images)
Vasseur doesn’t pay attention to the outside noise. He doesn’t do social media, nor does he read the media — he added a “sorry!” and laughed after making this point — or follow TV coverage. “I’m quite isolated,” he admitted. “I always put a lot of pressure on my shoulders by myself. When you are running your company, sometimes it’s a question of life, to survive, that you need to get results. The last 30 years of my life — and it was probably even worse at the beginning — I was in this situation.
“I don’t need someone to put the pressure on myself and say you need to win.” Especially at Ferrari, the need to win is simply understood. Seeing the fans at Monza only brought that closer to Vasseur’s doorstep.
Ferrari’s leadership structure allows Vasseur significant leeway to build the team as he sees fit. He consults mainly with brand CEO, Benedetto Vigna and Elkann. As Vasseur put it, they don’t need to “do a board meeting to decide a pit stop.”
Signing Hamilton is part of that, but after the summer break, he also plans to establish a new technical structure at the team after Enrico Cardile, its chassis technical chief, quit for Aston Martin.
Vasseur said in Hungary that it was “not a drama” to lose one person out of a 300-strong team. “I always push to explain that individuals are less important than the group,” he said.
It is perhaps for a similar reason that Ferrari’s interest in Adrian Newey, F1’s most successful designer, is understood to have cooled, with Aston Martin now leading the chase to sign him upon his exit from Red Bull early next year.
The Ferrari of the future will rely on more than just one person, or one driver. If it is to return to the glory days of its F1 peak in the early 2000s, when Michael Schumacher spearheaded a serial winning machine filled with top talent, it will rely on everyone. “I’m really convinced the performance is coming from all the employees,” Vasseur said.
Ferrari’s rivals have noticed a shift over the past 18 months. “The team seems to be much more structured, a no bulls— approach,” said Toto Wolff, Mercedes team principal and Vasseur’s good friend. “Fred has always been that. You can’t tell him a story because he’s going to see through it. There is a reason why the team has started winning races and competing for a constructors’ and drivers’ world championship.”
Red Bull F1 chief Christian Horner said Vasseur has “galvanized the team together pretty well” and that he was “a racer.” But he also noted how different Vasseur’s job is to any other in F1. “Every team has different pressures,” Horner said. “But with Ferrari, you have essentially a national team, and the pressure that goes with that and the expectation that goes with that.”
Starting next year, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton will have much of the responsibility for returning Ferrari to its previous form. (Robert Cianflone / Getty Images)
Again that word: pressure. Since Ferrari’s last constructors’ championship win in 2008, Vasseur is the fifth team principal to oversee the bid to end that drought. In many ways, he has represented a break with the past. But Ferrari’s history is inescapable. Pictures of its greatest moments in F1 surround the team in its motorhome. They’re plastered on the walls of Vasseur’s office.
“You can’t ignore the past, or the history,” Vasseur said. “(But) when we are doing the job, I think we have to be focused on today, not to think too much about the past, not to think too much about the future.”
Not thinking about the future when a driver of Hamilton’s quality is due to arrive may be tough. But for Vasseur, the focus now is laying the foundations across his Ferrari team, to empower everyone and make clear their success is very much shared.
“If we can keep the same dynamic,” he said, “and have everybody at the factory convinced that the results of the team are their results, I would be more than happy.”