The car launch season for the 2026 Formula 1 season is firmly under way with Red Bull, Racing Bulls, Haas, Audi and Mercedes all having revealed their liveries for this year.
Up next is Ferrari on Friday after what was a highly disappointing 2025 campaign, as the Italian outfit slipped to fourth in the championship and failed to win a grand prix for the first time since 2021.
But 2026 brings renewed optimism thanks to the widespread regulation changes, yet will that hope quickly fall flat just like it did in 2022?
What’s new at Ferrari?
Not a whole lot has changed at Ferrari for F1 2026, considering it has kept its driver pairing of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, Fred Vasseur remains team principal and, spoiler alert, the car it will reveal on Friday is red.
Recently, however, it was announced that Riccardo Adami will leave his role as Hamilton’s race engineer to oversee the testing of previous cars for members within the Ferrari young driver programme.
Adami is a Ferrari stalwart, the 52-year-old having joined from Toro Rosso in 2015 to work as a race engineer for Sebastian Vettel and then Hamilton’s predecessor Carlos Sainz. So the Italian naturally assumed that role when the seven-time world champion joined in 2025, but very early on it became apparent that there were communication issues between the pair.
Most notably in Monaco, where Hamilton claimed that radio communication “wasn’t that clear” after he suffered a grid penalty for impeding Max Verstappen in Q1 because his team mistakenly informed him that the Red Bull driver was slowing down.
Then on the Sunday, Hamilton gave the usual post-race message after finishing fifth but radio silence followed, to which the Briton reacted, “Are you upset with me or something?”.
There were also occasions where he voiced displeasure over strategy, such as Miami with the sarcastic “have a tea break while you’re at it”, so all year the Hamilton-Adami relationship just came across as fractious and it has been suggested that they lacked the requisite chemistry – even if that has been denied by the team.
Who Adami’s successor will be though is not yet known, but it needs to be somebody who can hit the ground running with Hamilton because he cannot just keep churning through them in hope that he’ll replicate what he had alongside Peter Bonnington at Mercedes.
Especially because this is such a big year for Hamilton, who had a disappointing 2025 by finishing sixth in the standings, 86 points behind fifth-placed Leclerc and failed to win a grand prix – the third time he has done so in four years.
If the struggles persist for the 41-year-old, then he could retire at the end of the season, especially because that is when Hamilton’s contract expires, and although it is understood that there’s an option for a third year, it needs to be beneficial for all parties to continue.
What’s the biggest challenge to Ferrari?
Ferrari is a team like no other, considering it is the only squad to have competed in every season of F1, and during that time it has established itself as the most successful outfit with a combined 31 championships.
Sometimes that can be its Achilles heel, because it brings a certain level of expectation each year and it doesn’t help that Ferrari constantly has the demanding Italian media on its back – similar to the coverage of Manchester United from the British press.
That was particularly seen last year, when major Italian publications were speculating that Vasseur’s Ferrari days were numbered plus that of key personnel following an underwhelming start to 2025.
Vasseur came out on the attack in Montreal, criticising the journalists who ran said stories before claiming that “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.”
So a big challenge for anybody at Ferrari is to try and block the outside noise to focus on the matter at hand, which is delivering upon said expectations. That is something the Scuderia needs to particularly do this year, as its 18-year championship drought goes on and Ferrari cannot afford to have a driver such as Leclerc on its books not win a title, or to have the blockbuster Hamilton move fail to deliver.
What’s the strongest asset to Ferrari?
Although there was last year’s speculation of Vasseur leaving Ferrari amid its 2025 woes, the Frenchman must still be considered as the Scuderia’s strongest asset; quite frankly, if Vasseur cannot lead Ferrari to success then nobody will.
Because Vasseur really is that good, something witnessed across his whole management career. It started in GP2, where he won the title with Hamilton, Nico Rosberg and Nico Hulkenberg as ART boss, before eventually making the step up to F1 with Renault.
Although that stint only lasted one season, he fared much better in his five years at Sauber where Vasseur helped nurture a rookie Leclerc, complete the Alfa Romeo deal and lead the relatively minnow Swiss squad to sixth in the 2022 championship.
It also helps that Vasseur is somewhat removed from the Italian bubble that has often plagued Ferrari over the years, as the 57-year-old exuberates a level of calmness and common sense that many of his predecessors failed to.
One example of that is his approach with the media, whether it was his response in Canada which helped to slightly defuse the situation or the way he constantly defends his drivers in the press – regardless of Hamilton, for example, suffering three straight Q1 exits.
He knows Ferrari isn’t a quick fix, that a lot of things need to change for the foundations to be stronger and there isn’t a better man for the job – a job which is quite possibly the hardest in F1 – because Vasseur has all the metal to deal with whatever gets thrown at the Scuderia boss.
What’s the goal in F1 2026 for Ferrari?
The goal for 2026 at Ferrari is quite simple: to return to the top. That’s because a lot of the older generation will have grown up on dominance from the Scuderia with its titles across the 1960s to early 2000s, but it is a completely different story for younger fans.
Many of them will not have even witnessed a Ferrari championship, considering the last was the 2008 constructors’ crown with its last drivers’ title coming the year before via Kimi Raikkonen – but it’s not like they’ve never had a chance to overcome that drought since.
First there was 2012 when Fernando Alonso squandered a 39-point lead over eventual champion Vettel, before the German had his own Ferrari heartache six years later; Vettel had the edge over Hamilton in the F1 2018 title battle, but then he crashed from the lead in Germany to hand his Mercedes rival all the momentum.
Heartache seems to be a theme for all Ferrari drivers, as Leclerc won two of the first three grands prix in 2022 – the opening year of ground-effect cars – to establish a 34-point lead. But then mistakes from the Monegasque, plus the team, led to Verstappen romping towards a second title.
Such constant failings have thus created a narrative at Ferrari that it often chokes in the high-pressure moments, so the goal must be to rewrite the script and bring the glory days back to Maranello.
The new regulations are a chance to do so, but as Leclerc once said last year in his best Elvis voice: “It’s now or never” to become champions.
