Fred Vasseur: “I underestimated” work needed to return Ferrari to the top in F1

Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur admitted that he “underestimated” the time it would take to return the famed Formula 1 team to its championship-winning ways, as its 17-year wait for an F1 title continues.

Despite flashes of promise in 2025, Ferrari has not been where it aimed to be this year. The Italian team invested heavily in its 2025 racer in the hope of leapfrogging the competition, but its progress couldn’t match McLaren, which has dominated the season so far.

“It’s quite intense,” Vasseur told the Beyond the Grid podcast. “For sure, we’re up and down on the sporting side, we always want to get more. But I would say overall it’s positive that we had, let’s speak about the last two years, a good improvement.”

While the Frenchman acknowledged that there were positives to take from the 2025 campaign, including a sprint win for Lewis Hamilton in China and a handful of podiums for Charles Leclerc, he admitted real progress will take time.

“What we underestimated, or I underestimated, is also the inertia at the beginning,” he added.

Frederic Vasseur, Ferrari

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

“To rebuild something or to do things differently is taking time, but it’s OK. Most important is that the mood in the team – even if we are emotional, even if we are Latin, even if you have bad results or bad sessions, it’s tough, but at the end the mood is on the positive side.”

The challenges Vasseur faces in turning around the fortunes of Ferrari are not exclusive to the Italian side, however. Williams is also on a long, slow road to recovery and Mercedes is still trying to reclaim the glory it witnessed just five years ago.

The slow-moving DNA of F1 is baked into every aspect of the sport, Vasseur explained. Regulation changes take years to finalise, car designs are finessed and fine-tuned over months – even years – and the simple act of bringing new talent onboard to transform a team can even face long delays; all of which are hitting Ferrari’s recovery effort.

“It’s true also that in F1 today, with the contract that the key personnel have, it means that if you want to recruit someone or if you want to change a little bit the organisation, it will take two years,” he said.

“You can take the example of Loic [Serra, chassis technical director at Ferrari], for example, who joined the team eight months ago. We probably started the discussion two years ago. And then the first car of the Loic era will be the next one.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

“It means that it’s probably a three-year project. And I’m not sure that today F1 and the world in general is keen to give three years to an organisation. If you have a look at some of our competitors, like Alpine, they changed the [team principal] each year the last eight or nine years.

“If you have to wait three years to bring something, if you change each year, it’s not the same timescale.”

Next season will be Vasseur’s fourth with the historic team, and with the Frenchman helming the ship as it builds up to F1’s sweeping regulation changes that are just around the corner, could he finally have had the time he needs to turn things around?