Why Ferrari will suffer F1 if team boss Vasseur really is under threat

The inability of the rear damper to control the Ferrari’s ride height has snowballed into a tricky political situation for team principal Frédéric Vasseur, one in which he may be fighting for his very future. That’s not how Vasseur’s plight has been reported but within such an insanely politically charged environment as Ferrari, that’s the ridiculous essence of why his efforts at bringing success to the Scuderia are being sidetracked, crucial energy diverted by a stupid distraction.

We’ll come back to the rear damper in a moment, but the ‘Vasseur under threat’ stories – two of them – appeared on the eve of the Canadian Grand Prix. When Italy’s Gazzetta dello Sport and Corriere della Sera both published pieces critical of him on the same day despite being totally separate entities, it had all the hallmarks of a campaign from higher up the chain of Ferrari command. A seasoned Ferrari man, no longer there, watched on with a ‘seen it all before’ expression. “In my experience, it suggests that he is no longer being protected,” he said. Both Ferrari and the papers have a shared history of ownership and the relationship between the senior editors and their old bosses is still close. The stories carry weight.

Vasseur was clearly blindsided by developments as he arrived in Montreal and the barrage of questions he faced was not the ideal preparation for Ferrari’s weekend.

“We must ask ourselves the right questions if Ferrari hasn’t won for years…” he said. “We’ve changed the team principal, the drivers, we’ve changed everything except one thing…” The “one thing” Vasseur was referencing was the Italian media and the cycle of impatience when things aren’t going as well as expected for Ferrari. But although Vasseur didn’t say it, the company’s senior management conspires with that media to energise this cycle.

“I knew when I took the job that I would be exposed,” Vasseur continued. “I can handle that. What is not fair is that it impacts on other people in the team, who are human beings with feelings… Each time that you have a kind of distraction or issue internally, you are losing a little bit of focus during the season, and we have to then recover it. I have the feeling that sometimes teams in the UK are a bit more on their own and a bit more focused on what they are doing. The best example for me is McLaren. They were at the back, but they were focused. They worked on their own, and they improved step by step.”

“I knew when I took the job that I would be exposed. I can handle that”

Good progress was made by Ferrari last year, a competitive car at most races, good strategies and pit work. So the external expectations were heightened to the point where anything less than a title fight in ’25 was going to be considered failure. The car looked good in testing, quick and balanced. Lewis Hamilton scored that China sprint victory from pole. But the later disqualification from the main event for excessive plank wear signalled trouble. The car had been conceived with a more rearwards cockpit than the ’24 car to improve airflow to the underbody for more downforce. But this had to be achieved within the same wheelbase (which was already at the regulation maximum). So the gearbox casing was shortened, meaning a more compressed space for the rear suspension. Which is why the small rear damper has turned out not to be powerful enough to prevent the car wearing its plank excessively when run at the super-low ride height the underfloor was designed for. Hence the ride height had to be increased, losing downforce. That routine piece of development that has taken a couple of months to correct has snowballed the team into apparent crisis.

“When you’re asking us, ‘Where are you?’, we are improving,” says Vasseur. “But the target is to improve faster than the others. It’s a long process… and when we are not doing well, we are aware. It means we are trying to put everything together, we are pushing, and the most important is to be able to do your own job. That’s sometimes where we are struggling a little bit.”

He’s blaming the media for Ferrari not being allowed to just get on with the job. But the media – in this case the chosen Italian outlets – are being fed this from inside with what seems like co-ordination. Someone high up within the organisation is using its chosen publications to follow an agenda – and that corporate meddling is where it is falling down. It’s perfectly entitled to meddle, of course. As the owner, it’s their prerogative. But it’s counterproductive and the groundhog day repetitiveness is all the more confounding when the blueprint for how to be truly successful is right there in its own history, in the Ross Brawn/Michael Schumacher/Jean Todt era: minimal corporate interference.

But perhaps when history spells out that the route to success is for senior management to butt out, it’s not a lesson that management wants to hear. F1 does not submit to standard management science. It’s way more complex and nuanced. What was the next dominant team after Brawn-era Ferrari? Red Bull – an independent racing team making racing decisions, left unencumbered by its visionary owner. Then? Mercedes, the automotive giant standing back after providing the budget, leaving the team to do what was required. Then Red Bull again. Now McLaren, the owners standing back and allowing the team to flower, having accepted errors along the way. How much clearer does it need to be?

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