The problem with Ferrari’s endless team principal speculation

We're at that point in the Formula 1 season again. You know how it goes: Ferrari has something of a pallid afternoon at a circuit that wasn't entirely expected to play to its strengths, a certain individual suggests to a media outlet that he 'might fit in quite well at Ferrari, actually', and thus Fred Vasseur gets asked about his job security purely on the back of said individual's speculative self-publicising.

It happened last year around Barcelona time, if you'll remember: in the team principals' press conference (just after Flavio Briatore had given hilariously short shrift to a question about Mick Schumacher) Christian Horner was asked a question about being linked to Ferrari, to which he responded, "there’s a bunch of speculation, always in this business, people coming here, going there, whatever. I think people in the team know exactly what the situation is. I mean, my Italian is worse than Flavio’s English, so how on earth would that work?"

More to the point, the link appeared to come from nowhere. Horner was then let go by Red Bull at the start of July, Vasseur then signed a new contract with Ferrari at the end of the month, the Horner-Ferrari link had the lifespan of a fruit fly, and we all moved on with our lives. But life is cyclical sometimes, and so we end up retreading old ground; Horner gave an interview to The Times, hinted that Ferrari would be the only team on the grid where he wouldn't ask for a part-ownership deal to lead the team, waxed lyrical about its history and sleeping giant status, and then said something about Toto Wolff needing a rival again. Or, as Vasseur put it bluntly: "Mr Horner is looking for a job."

In football terms, this would be filed as a "come-and-get-me plea": a neatly curated attempt to solicit a bid from a rival team on the basis that a player has 'always dreamed of playing for them' - although status and prestige can be conveniently forgotten if the wage packet is particularly lucrative. But Mr Horner doesn't need the money. He probably just misses F1, and he's a bit bored of his steak being too juicy and his lobster being too buttery. 

Either way, it's not entirely fair on Vasseur and his team. Ferrari has endured the largely unique problem of excessive speculation about the inner workings of the team for decades, and it's something that Vasseur himself criticised - more out of concern for his employees than for his own future.

Last year, he gave the example that an Italian newspaper had suggested that the Prancing Horse was to sign a handful of engineers from other teams, leading the engineers already in those roles to feel fearful about their futures. Vasseur reasoned, and quite rightly, that those employees should be allowed to exist in a world where they're not looking over their shoulders due to media speculation. 

Lewis Hamilton credited Vasseur as the reason he joined Ferrari

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

“You have to understand that when a journalist is saying that Ferrari will recruit this name for this position, there is someone within this position and on the Sunday evening the guy says ‘OK, tomorrow morning I won't have a job anymore if what’s in the newspaper is true, I will have someone in my position’," Vasseur said last year.

“We are in this situation on a daily basis now in Italy and it is too much. If they want to be successful, we have to be able to work in a clean environment and we are not in this situation.”

This has been a problem for decades. The story goes that, during the late 1990s, Ross Brawn banned newspapers from the Maranello offices to stop members of the team having to worry about such speculation - but that's much more tricky in the social media age, where folk doomscroll out of habit and have their Instagram comments hijacked by those who don't understand the concept of personal boundaries. 

The role of team principal needs to stop being seen as analogous to a football manager, and swapping one out for another isn't going to magically make the car quicker. You don't get new manager bounces in F1

Of course, there are fervent Ferrari fans who want the team to start winning more. It hasn't won a title since 2008, although it got very close to the constructors' championship in 2024 when it squared up to McLaren in the Abu Dhabi finale of that year. It's also fair to say that recent results haven't hit the heights of 2026's first half, as the likes of McLaren and Red Bull have found great improvement after starting the year on the wrong foot. 

But here's the inconvenient truth: changing the fortunes of an F1 team is a continual long-term project. The role of team principal needs to stop being seen as analogous to a football manager, and swapping one out for another isn't going to magically make the car quicker. You don't get new manager bounces in F1. You don't stick Ole Gunnar Solskjaer on the pit wall and start winning races with vibes alone. Teams rely on their infrastructure and their processes in the factory as much as they do on the drivers' abilities. It's a boring truth, granted, but nobody ever said reality needed to be thrilling at all times.

This level of speculation was never really seen when team principals were often the owners of the team, but that's when F1 was much smaller as an entity. Today, only Toto Wolff and Adrian Newey are genuine stakeholders in their respective teams, while the rest are contracted workers picked to lead a team of around 1000 people. Football management, while its own challenge, can be like turning a speedboat - F1 management is more like turning around an oil tanker while stuck in the Suez Canal. 

Depending on the state of the team, it might require years to get into a winning position, especially if there's a series of limitations that are hindering the team from making forward progression. And let's not forget that the field around them isn't staying still either; even investments in objectively the correct areas of the team guarantee nothing, because there are 10 other teams all embarking on the same journey. 

Ferrari has been through this all before. It took Jean Todt years to restructure the team in the mid-1990s, albeit helped significantly by Michael Schumacher's arrival and the transplantation of Benetton's technical leadership into Maranello - and even then, championship success was not instant.

Ferrari has had a better season in 2026, but lost ground to Mercedes and Red Bull in Baku

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

Even then, context helps; Williams dropped off when it lost Newey and Renault, McLaren won titles again but started to have its own difficulties with reliability and a lack of cohesion in the early 2000s, and Ferrari was eventually toppled by a resurgent Renault and a change to the tyre regulations. That's not to take the shine off Ferrari's titles, but rather to outline the point that this is not even analogous to today. The team was less than half the size of Ferrari today, and F1 was not nearly as refined. In 2050, it'll be even more difficult to change the competitive order.

And let's not forget that this is only Vasseur's fourth season leading Ferrari. Under his management, Ferrari got the sole win of a Red Bull-dominated 2023, almost won a title, had an off-year in 2025 (which, let's be honest, was an engineering gamble that didn't pay off) and has since claimed two wins in a season characterised by Mercedes' domination and a complete shake-up in the regulations. 

And Horner knows how this all goes too. He'd built Red Bull up with Newey by his side, but it was the 2009 change in regulations that eventually brought the team to the fore, just as it was that the 2014 advent of the turbo-hybrid rules set the team back. Was he subject to such scrutiny during the lean years post-2013? No, and it was good for the team that the late Dietrich Mateschitz continued to support the operation as it ended up winning in the 2020s. 

Horner's time did come to an end, but it was arguably at a point where Red Bull felt it needed to completely refresh the team following Mateschitz's death, the exit of other key team members, the allegations surrounding Horner, and the 2024 power struggle between he and Helmut Marko. But even then, this was the coalescence of different threads intertwining into a sticky web of problems; Vasseur is not in such a position.

Were Ferrari ensconced within the midfield and struggling to score points, then such speculation would be understandable - even if still slightly distasteful if there was a clear reason for a blip. But it's won races this season, even with an underpowered engine, and sits second in the constructors' championship despite the resurgent form of its other "Big Four" competitors.

Does the team need a pick-me-up? Sure. But conceding to the speculation won't change that.

This isn't football!

There is still hope for Ferrari

Photo by: Clive Rose / Formula 1 via Getty Images