How Vasseur has begun Ferrari’s mission to keep Leclerc on side

When it comes to Ferrari there are no half measures. When the Scuderia wins we speak of triumphs, when it loses we’re faced with a Greek tragedy: even if only figuratively, the final act concludes with blood on the floor. In Maranello everything is extreme, the spotlights are on the team 24/7, throwing every action into stark relief – everything makes the news when there are millions of fans in red eager to comment on the smallest of happenings.

Changes of team principals aren’t a rarity in Maranello. Those who covet the seat of management – or merely agree to sit on it a while – know well what they are getting into, and shouldn’t be too surprised if their head is called to the chopping block in the event of a defeat.

In the four years he occupied the helm of Ferrari, Mattia Binotto won very little: three grands prix in 2019, four in 2022. And in between, two very difficult seasons for the Scuderia, during which the team principal managed to survive by promising a great comeback when the technical regulations would change.

Ferrari actually returned to winning last year, but not as much as hoped, and above all it only did so in the first half of the season. Even so, Fred Vasseur’s arrival in Maranello has divided opinions – between those who would have liked to see Binotto’s cycle continue, and those who deemed a change in the direction of the team was both necessary and urgent. But Binotto’s fate was already written last autumn, owing to a complex chain of circumstances which can only be understood by taking a step back.

No succession plan

When at the end of 2018 Binotto won the internal battle in Maranello against the polarising figure of Maurizio Arrivabene, he was aware he was facing the biggest challenge of his professional life. Few people knew the reality of Ferrari like Binotto, who entered it immediately after graduating in engineering, in 1995, as his first place of work. Binotto’s has been a remarkable climb: year after year he has risen in rank to the highest position in the Gestione Sportiva, the headquarters of Ferrari’s Formula 1 programme.

The final step was possible thanks to excellent work done in the role of technical director, as he oversaw a return to competitiveness in 2017-2018, but the transition to the role of team principal meant having to face a very different job from the previous one. Moving from technical problems to managerial ones requires other qualities and, even if in the past there have been technicians able to play the role of team principal very well (Ross Brawn, one of Ferrari’s most successful technical directors of the past few decades, is the best example), running an entire organisation rather than single portion of it throws up unexpected challenges.

Binotto attempted to combine his team principal role with his prior position as technical director

Photo by: FIA Pool

The first anomaly with the Scuderia Ferrari managed by Binotto was the decision not to name a successor to him. For four seasons in Maranello, the role of technical director and team principal merged in the same person.

Binotto was very skilled in managing difficult situations, such as the thorny matter of the 2019 power unit which led to a secret agreement with the FIA. But even this apparent success came at a price: catastrophic results in 2020 with a car whose aerodynamics had been conceived in the expectation of a more powerful engine. The circumstances of the pandemic gave little headroom to turn this around but there was still a very slight improvement in 2021.

Binotto managed to survive this very difficult period by promising the great redemption in 2022, an appointment for which Ferrari would not be found unprepared. The message sent by Binotto was clear: the Scuderia technical staff pivoted to a complete focus on the 2022 car as early as possible. As Ferrari laboured through two challenging seasons its leadership was at pains to argue that this state of affairs was only temporary, and normal competitive service would be resumed in the new ground-effect era. This allowed Binotto and his work group to publicly write off 2021, but it greatly increased the expectations for 2022.

Why Binotto had to go

The excellent start to last season was in line with the promised targets, but two problems swiftly arose which were at the root of the end of the relationship between Binotto and Ferrari. Expectations began to streak beyond the team’s capacity to fulfil them. Ferrari was at its best in the first three races of the season, where everything seemed to go according to plan. After Leclerc’s victory in Melbourne there was much talk, especially in Italy, that the world championship – not claimed by a Ferrari driver since Kimi Raikkonen in 2007 – was a realistic possibility. Fans accustomed to serial disappointments dared to dream once again.

One of the hallmarks of the Binotto era was the refusal to acknowledge or admit to failures, which the team principal would defend to the hilt or try to explain away even in the face of evidence of critical mistakes

Then everything changed quickly. The chorus in this latest Greek tragedy began to strike up its dire foreshadowings of great doom and distress at the Spanish GP, where a power unit failure forced Leclerc to retire. Further manifestations in subsequent races led to the decision not to use the engine in its highest power modes during the second half of the season.

Seven days later, in Monaco, a sensational strategy error deprived Ferrari of a potential one-two finish. What made this situation even more difficult was the damage caused to Leclerc, the driver who up until that moment was clearly the team’s best performer. Ferrari utterly mismanaged the transition from wet to dry conditions, dithering when Red Bull brought Sergio Perez in for intermediates and only calling Leclerc in (from the lead) two laps later. Carlos Sainz, seeing the track was almost dry, refused the order – with the result that Leclerc had to sit behind Sainz in the pits when they both stopped for slicks. This incident shook Leclerc’s faith in the team in two ways: he lost confidence in its strategic competence and began to feel Sainz had the ear of management rather than him.

Leclerc was left fuming by Ferrari's mishandling of the strategy at Monaco last season as momentum ebbed towards Red Bull in the title fight

Photo by: Erik Junius

This impression was magnified at Silverstone, when Ferrari differentiated its strategies but failed to let Leclerc maximise his. Running faster in the early stages, Leclerc had to beg the team to order Sainz to let him past; and then circumstances around a late Safety Car period led the team to pit Sainz to cover Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes and leave Leclerc out.

Sainz then rejected the team’s request to protect his team-mate at the start. While this was the right call to ensure a Ferrari driver actually won the race (as drivers on fresher tyres swamped Leclerc), it made the pitwall look weak. And it magnified tensions between Binotto and his star driver.

It’s believed that Leclerc and his manager, the supremely well-connected Nicolas Todt, privately began to lobby Ferrari’s most senior management for change, a process which gathered momentum as the team began to lose ground in another crucial area: development.

Leclerc’s victory in Austria, in mid-July, would be the team’s last of the season. Concerns began to grow within the team that it had taken the wrong way in development, or at best been out-developed by Red Bull. During the Italian Grand Prix weekend it ran back-to-back tests on track between the F1-75’s original floor and a new spec introduced in France, months earlier. Only the evidence of this evaluation persuaded the team that the new floor had been an improvement after all.

Criticism began to rain publicly from above. There had been a regime change at Ferrari during Binotto’s tenure: In December 2020 CEO Louis Camilleri left his position for health reasons, ultimately replaced by Benedetto Vigna – who, after spending his first year focused on the road car side of the business, began to develop a close and increasingly vocal interest in the Scuderia. Having lost the confidence of the new CEO as well as the president, John Elkann, Binotto’s fate was sealed.

Although Vasseur has a strong relationship with Todt through their partnership in the winning ART Grand Prix team, he’s also good friends with Carlos Tavares, the powerful CEO of Stellantis who, with Elkann, engineered the landmark merger between Fiat-Chrysler and Peugeot Citroen. Vasseur’s recruitment was approved by both Vigna and Elkann, who want a new era at Ferrari to bear their signatures.

Vasseur rings in the changes

Vasseur is understood to have been in the frame for the team principal role at Ferrari in 2018, when rumours circulated he was the preferred choice of then-president Sergio Marchionne. But this prospect faded in the flurry of events which surrounded Marchionne’s untimely death that year.

Even if in F1 Vasseur hasn’t yet obtained results of tremendous significance, he boasts a vast experience in motorsport. In Maranello a man of the track, an organiser with a profound knowledge of the work carried out in a racing team and with great experience of driver management, was seen as necessary – someone with both the knowledge to identify weaknesses and the clout to rectify them.

Activities concerning relations with sponsors and media fall within Vasseur’s remit, while Mekies focuses on team management

Photo by: Ferrari

 “I need a period of learning,” Vasseur insisted in his first press conference, held in Maranello in January – but within weeks he had clearly learned enough to begin reshaping the Scuderia’s operations. The first topic on Vasseur’s agenda was the strategy team, whose head – Inaki Rueda – was banished to a factory role while Ravin Jain was appointed in his place.

The team’s pitwall complement was reduced from eight people to six, and head of track operations Claudio Albertini (a senior engineering figure for many years) was transferred to the Ferrari Driver Academy. Sporting director Laurent Mekies also lost some of his previous responsibilities. Activities concerning relations with sponsors and media, as well as driver management, will now fall within Vasseur’s remit, while Mekies focuses solely on team management.

It’s not a massive revolution, but it represents change after a long period of stability in the team guaranteed by Binotto. One of the hallmarks of the Binotto era was the refusal to acknowledge or admit to failures, which the team principal would defend to the hilt or try to explain away even in the face of evidence of critical mistakes.

Both on the track and in his human and professional relationships, Leclerc has added tremendous value to Ferrari. There is nobody within Ferrari’s young-driver ladder ready to operate at his level should he choose to depart

Vasseur has made it clear that everything is up for reassessment during his reign: he wants Ferrari to be more like Red Bull or Mercedes, targeting continuous improvement in all areas. He emphasised that the changes to the strategy setup were “not about the person”, but part of a wider reassessment of process, communication and technology.

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“If you stay at the same level two weeks in a row you are dead,” he said during the Bahrain test. “Because everybody else is improving.”

The path that awaits Vasseur certainly isn’t as steep as the one taken by Jean Todt in 1993. Ferrari finished 2022 as runner-up, has sound technical know-how and a reasonable organisational structure. The first problem Vasseur will have to familiarise himself with will be the pressure, destined to increase if the results don’t live up to expectations, or if Ferrari doesn’t confirm itself as a title contender by the end of the season.

Early in the Todt era, president Luca di Montezemolo intervened in the difficult moments to publicly confirm his faith in the working group, taking pressure off the team. Elkann and Vigna are unlikely to do this; so far, their only public interventions have been to heap pressure on the team leaders rather than deflect it.

Although Leclerc’s deal runs until the end of 2024, in reality the decision on whether to extend it or not will be shaped by events this year

Photo by: Ferrari

Another significant challenge for Vasseur will be to manage the relationship between Sainz and Leclerc, a couple who already had critical moments last year. Any further friction here will feed into another situation looming on Vasseur’s radar: Leclerc’s contract renewal.

Although Leclerc’s deal runs until the end of 2024, in reality the decision on whether to extend it or not will be shaped by events this year. If the SF-23 can be made reliable and race-winningly competitive, if Ferrari can develop it effectively through the season, and if the team can operate at a consistently high level, Leclerc will have few reasons to transfer his allegiance elsewhere. That amounts to a lot of ‘ifs’.

Over the past four years, both on the track and in his human and professional relationships with the whole team, Leclerc has added tremendous value to Ferrari. Also, pressingly, there is nobody within Ferrari’s young-driver ladder ready to operate at his level should he choose to depart. For all these reasons he would be massive loss to the Scuderia, and one which would invite the wrath of fans, media, sponsors and senior management.

For Vasseur, then, the race to keep Leclerc in red has already begun.

Can Vasseur keep Leclerc at Ferrari?

Photo by: Ferrari