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When Fred Vasseur walked through the doors at Maranello in December 2022, he did not expect to find a team so reluctant to take risks. Three years on, the Ferrari team principal is still working to eradicate that instinct — and he believes it could be the difference between winning and losing a world championship.
Ferrari turned to Vasseur after Mattia Binotto's resignation, bringing in the Frenchman to lead a rebuild at a team that had not won the F1 drivers' championship since Kimi Raikkonen's triumph in 2007, nor the constructors' title since 2008. What he found was a team operating with an ingrained sense of self-protection — engineers padding performance margins to avoid exposure rather than chasing every last tenth.
"It's not that there was a culture of fear or blame or whatever, but maybe it was a bit on the back foot," Vasseur told The Race. "The first thing that shocked me when I joined was the gap that we had on every single topic, just because we didn't want to be exposed."
His assessment was precise and damning in equal measure. "Add a kilo more weight, half or a litre or more [of fuel], open the sidepod more, one step more. At the end of the day, when you put everything on the table, it was two tenths."
In a sport where margins are measured in thousandths of a second, two tenths is an enormous performance gift handed to the opposition. "You can't be at zero, but between zero and two-tenths there is one-tenth. And if you consider the average between us and the guy in front of us last year was three hundredths of a second, you can imagine the impact of one tenth on the season."
Vasseur is not simply diagnosing the problem — he is actively working to rewire the mindset of an entire organisation. Every member of the Scuderia's technical staff, he insists, must understand that their individual contribution has a direct impact on performance.
"This mindset, I'm pushing like hell to convince everybody that they are all a performance contributor. It's the mindset of Loic, too," he added.
While Vasseur refutes suggestions that Ferrari operated under a "culture of fear", his candour about the cautious approach he inherited speaks volumes. Historically, Ferrari's engineers have often been held to account when upgrades fail, strategic errors squander victories, or title bids fall apart. Vasseur is consciously steering the team away from that dynamic.
His boldness is not confined to the factory floor, either. When McLaren surged at the start of the 2025 season, Vasseur made the decisive call to halt development of Ferrari's 2025 car entirely — redirecting all resources towards their 2026 challenger. It was an aggressive strategic bet, and one that has begun to pay dividends.
For a deeper look at how Ferrari's 2026 technical decisions are playing out on track, the aerodynamic choices made by the Scuderia at the Miami Grand Prix offer a revealing case study.
The fruits of Vasseur's cultural shift are beginning to show. Ferrari are having their best start to a Formula 1 season since 2022, currently sitting second in the constructors' standings. Charles Leclerc — who is closing in on a significant personal milestone at the Scuderia — has taken two Grand Prix podiums through the opening four rounds, while Lewis Hamilton claimed his first Ferrari podium in China and went one better to win the Shanghai Sprint.
Yet the challenge remains formidable. Mercedes lead the constructors' standings, and Leclerc sits third in the drivers' championship, trailing Andrea Kimi Antonelli by 41 points after just four races.
The gap is real, but so is Ferrari's momentum. Under Vasseur, Maranello is thinking differently — and in Formula 1, that can be the most consequential change of all.
Il est ingénieur logiciel et passionné de Formule 1 et de sport automobile. Il a cofondé Formula Live Pulse afin de rendre les données télémétriques en direct et les informations sur les courses accessibles, visuelles et faciles à suivre.
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