“It's basically the same as it's been for three years,” Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur said of Ferrari’s engineering setup while facing questions from the media ahead of the 2025 Imola GP.
“We've made some mistakes with the car, but we know where to improve.”
The line of questioning directed at Vasseur is not new in motorsport, nor at Ferrari’s Maranello HQ. If a car doesn’t live up to expectations, who is responsible? And can one hope that a technical department will produce a winning project if it features the same people involved in one which has fallen short?
Lewis Hamilton’s sprint race win in China is the outlier in a season in which Ferrari is lagging badly – fourth in the constructors’ standings and 152 points behind the leading McLaren team. The indifferent performance on track has been shadowed by a wave of negativity regarding the SF-25 and its genesis.
When things go wrong on track, the reaction in the outside world begins with analysis and soon shifts to the people behind the project. At Imola, Vasseur was asked whether there is full confidence in the technical staff working on the 2026 car. In response, he was precise in clarifying the position of Loic Serra, the technical director who joined from Mercedes last October to replace Enrico Cardile, who remains on ‘gardening leave’ pending a move to Aston Martin.
“When Loic arrived in Maranello six months ago, the current car was already, let's say, 90 percent defined,” Vasseur said. “Then, of course, it depends on individual elements, but the key decisions behind the project had already been made.
