Frédéric Vasseur pushes Ferrari past its cautious two-tenths habit

frédéric vasseur said Ferrari had been too cautious when he arrived, and he has kept pushing the team to stop protecting itself from exposure. He said that old habit could cost two tenths of a second, a gap that matters when Ferrari was separated from the car in front by three hundredths last year.

Ferrari’s safety margin

"It's not that there was a culture of fear or blame or whatever - but maybe it was a bit on the back foot," Vasseur said. "The first thing that shocked me when I joined was the gap that we had on every single topic, just because we didn't want to be exposed."

He broke down the old approach in blunt terms. "Add a kilo more weight [to be safe with the limit], half or litre or more [of fuel], open the sidepod more, one step more. At the end of the day, when you put everything on the table, it was two tenths."

That is the margin Ferrari is trying to erase. Vasseur said the team cannot run at zero margin, but he pointed to one tenth as the space between caution and the kind of risk needed to find lap time. He added that the average gap between Ferrari and the car in front of it last year was three hundredths of a second.

Loic Serra and the new push

The shift has accelerated this season, with Ferrari introducing the Macarena rear wing, the exhaust wing and winglets on its halo. Technical director Loic Serra arrived in October 2024, and Vasseur said the broader message has been to push ideas harder and judge them by lap time, not by how visible they look on the car.

"This mindset, I'm pushing like hell to convince everybody that they are all a performance contributor. It’s the mindset of Loic, too," he said. "In terms of innovation, it's a message that we have to push everything, all day, to say ‘don't be shy,’"

He said Ferrari does not punish people when a proposal fails. "If you have something to propose, be open. We never blame someone if you have something to propose and it's not working."

Lap time over appearance

Vasseur also cautioned against reading too much into the parts that have appeared on the car. "Don't overestimate what I said," he said. The target, in his view, is not to make innovation obvious from the outside but to make it show up where it counts: on the stopwatch.

For Ferrari, that leaves a clear operational task. Keep chasing small gains, keep removing the instinct to back off, and keep turning those ideas into lap time rather than safe compromises. In Formula 1, the difference between playing it safe and trusting one more step can be measured in hundredths.