Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur has admitted that he “underestimated” how long it would take to restore the team to a position to win the ultimate prize in Formula 1 again.
The Italian marque’s extensive period without a championship since 2008 is all but guaranteed to continue as McLaren can claim the Constructors’ title this weekend.
Ferrari came close to dispelling its prolonged drought in 2024, but the team concluded the campaign a mere but agonising 15 points behind the Woking-based squad.
And while McLaren has built on that success to dominate the ongoing season, Ferrari languishes 337 points back and without a race win with eight rounds remaining.
But despite the disappointment that this campaign has brought, Vasseur has voiced that Ferrari is in a better place to challenge compared to when he arrived in 2023.
However, the Frenchman conceded that the time it would take to rebuild the fabled squad was an aspect he had underappreciated when he succeeded Mattia Binotto.
“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.
“What we underestimated, or I underestimated, is also the inertia at the beginning.
“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.”
Vasseur cites patience as crucial in Ferrari rebuild
Vasseur has highlighted the protracted lead times involved when recruiting from elsewhere in the paddock as a huge obstacle when attempting to restructure a team.
“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 explained.
“You can take the example of Loic [Serra, Ferrari’s Chassis Technical Director], for example, who joined the team [from Mercedes] 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.”
That has made Vasseur thankful that he has been given the chance to build on his work to date with a new deal to lead Ferrari into the sport’s upcoming rule changes.
“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,” he continued.
“If you have a look at some of our competitors, like Alpine, they changed the [team boss] 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.”
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