Ferrari team boss Frederic Vasseur criticizes the growing impatience in Formula 1 and explains why changes only become noticeable after years
Frederic Vasseur has been team boss at Ferrari for a good two and a half years now. The Frenchman joined the Scuderia for the 2023 season, but has not yet managed to bring the first world championship title since 2008 to Maranello.
Nevertheless, his Ferrari contract was extended again in the summer of 2025 – which is not a matter of course in the fast-paced business of the premier class. In the Beyond the Grid podcast, Vasseur explains that hardly anyone has patience these days.
You can’t change things overnight in Formula 1, says Vasseur, who explains: “Take Loic [Serra], for example, who joined the team eight months ago. We probably started talking about that two years ago.“
”And then the next car [in 2026] will be the first of the Loic era. That means it’s probably a three-year project. And I’m not sure that Formula 1 and the world in general are ready today to give an organization three years,” says Vasseur.
The fact is that Ferrari has changed significantly since Vasseur took office in early 2023. Many people have left, including Laurent Mekies, who is now team principal at Red Bull, and many others have arrived, such as record world champion Lewis Hamilton.
Technical director Loic Serra, mentioned by Vasseur, is also one of the new signings. It was announced back in May 2024 that Serra would be moving from Mercedes to Ferrari, but he didn’t start in Maranello until October – less than a year ago.
Vasseur: Impatience makes it “quite difficult at times”
However, as the project for 2025 was already well advanced at that point, the 2026 car will be the first for which Serra is truly responsible. This is a very similar situation to Aston Martin, where the signing of Adrian Newey was also announced in 2024.
But here, too, the 2026 car will be the first to come from Newey’s pen. It is precisely for these reasons that Vasseur emphasizes that in Formula 1, it sometimes takes years for changes to really become noticeable.
“If you look at some of our competitors, such as Alpine, they have changed team bosses every year for the last eight or nine years,” says Vasseur, somewhat exaggerating. He himself does not believe in such hasty decisions.
“But we can’t change that,” he says of the growing impatience in Formula 1 and in society in general, explaining: “That means we have to deal with it and accept it. And it’s true that the media is different, social media is different than it used to be.”
“People want everything for the next day. That’s the general mentality. And in the end, it’s sometimes quite difficult with some projects,“ says Vasseur, who has now been given a little more time to lead Ferrari back to the top.
Ferrari did not disclose the exact length of his new contract when it was extended in the summer. The only information given was that the contract had been extended ”by several years.”