I’M A RACER FIRST
Poisoned chalice perhaps, but new Ferrari principal Fred Vasseur couldn’t resist the call from Maranello. As he tells Adam Cooper, forget any five-year plans – winning starts now
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Is new team principal Fred Vasseur the man to steer Scuderia Ferrari to its first world championship since Kimi Räikkönen’s triumph back in 2007? The Frenchman is the first outsider to come in as boss at Maranello since his countryman Jean Todt exactly 30 years ago, and as such it’s hard not to draw parallels between the two.
The big difference is that back in 1993 the Italian team was at rock bottom, and it took Todt several years and the hiring of Michael Schumacher, Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne to finally turn things around. Vasseur in contrast joins a team that at times in 2022 had the fastest car, pushed Red Bull hard for much of the season, and generally left Mercedes far behind. However it fell short in areas such as consistency, power unit reliability and strategy.
There’s no denying that Vasseur has a much stronger starting point than his predecessor had three decades ago. However the marginal gains that make the difference between winning and losing are hard to realise, and that’s where the challenge lies.
Vasseur is the fifth Ferrari team principal to be faced with the difficult task of following Todt’s ‘Dream Team’ era. Stefano Domenicali, Marco Mattiacci, Maurizio Arrivabene and Mattia Binotto were all insiders, and ultimately all were deemed to have fallen short.