- Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur called the speculation over his job “a bit personal” as rumors swirl that Christian Horner wants to replace him.
- The talk intensified after Horner told The Times that Ferrari was “the dream” job, the only team he would return to F1 to lead after leaving Red Bull.
- Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, both drivers Vasseur helped develop as teenagers long before Ferrari, have publicly backed him to stay through the crisis.
The Man Who Built Hamilton and Leclerc Now Needs Them to Save Him
Fred Vasseur spent the week after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix fielding questions that had nothing to do with power units or tire degradation. He got on a call with media on October 2 to address something closer to home: whether he still has a job. “Sometimes the attacks are a bit personal — and this is not good,” he said, a rare crack in the composure that has defined his four years at Ferrari. He added that the team needed “to work in serenity” after what he described as a week of “noise and all the rumours in the press.”
The irony sitting underneath all of it is hard to miss. The two drivers whose support Vasseur now leans on, Hamilton and Leclerc, are the same two he discovered and shaped before either of them wore red. Vasseur signed a teenage Hamilton to his ASM team in 2005 and watched him win the Euro Formula 3 title, then took him to GP2 with ART Grand Prix the following year and won that too. Leclerc came through the same program a decade later, taking the GP3 crown with ART in 2016 before Vasseur brought him into Sauber and then Ferrari. The man who built both of their careers in open-wheel racing’s lower rungs is now counting on them, as grown men with a combined four world titles on the grid, to vouch for him at the top.
Horner’s Shadow Over Baku
The speculation did not come out of nowhere. Christian Horner left Red Bull last September after a reported settlement in the region of £80 million, following two decades running the team he built from a midfield operation into a four-time champion. Under the terms of that exit, he was barred from taking another F1 role until the middle of 2026. That window has now passed, and Horner has spent recent months making clear he has not lost his appetite for the paddock. His comments to The Times during the Baku weekend, in which he called Ferrari “the dream” job and the only seat he would come back for, landed in the middle of a Ferrari season that has fallen short of its own targets.
Vasseur did not pretend the timing was a coincidence. “Mr Horner is looking for a job — that everybody knows — everywhere,” he told reporters in Baku, a line delivered with the dry resignation of a man who has heard this question many times already this year. Asked directly whether he could picture working alongside Horner at Maranello, he deflected: “You have to ask my assistant.” He was more pointed about the cost of the distraction itself. “For the media, for 50% of the questions [to be] about this, I think it’s a bit of a frustrating situation,” he said, noting that even his own engineers were being pulled into conversations about succession instead of the car. “We are fighting for P2 in the championship, and at the end of the day, we are all speaking a lot about this, and even for the guys in the garage, to discuss about this, it’s the best discussion that we can have.”
The Students Defend Their Teacher
Ferrari itself moved to shut the story down, issuing a statement affirming Vasseur retained the backing of chairman John Elkann and chief executive Benedetto Vigna. Hamilton, typically guarded in these moments, gave one of his shortest answers of the season when Sky Sports asked if he still believed Ferrari was “on a good path” with Vasseur in charge. “Yes,” he said. Pressed on whether there was unity inside the team, he nodded and added, “yep.” Asked what Ferrari could still achieve in the remaining races, he kept it to two words: “keep trying.”
Leclerc has been more expansive about his loyalty to Vasseur in the past, and the sentiment has not shifted. He has described the pair as “completely aligned” on the matter, pointing to a relationship that predates Ferrari by nearly a decade. “We both know Fred since many years and we both trust that Fred is the right person in order to bring Ferrari back to the top,” Leclerc said during an earlier round of the same speculation. “Is this something I enjoy? No, of course not. I don’t think anybody enjoys it in the team.” For two drivers who do not always see eye to eye with each other, their alignment on Vasseur has been one of the few constants of Ferrari’s season.
A Pattern Ferrari Has Seen Before
None of this is new territory for Vasseur, which is part of what makes the current round feel heavier rather than lighter. Ferrari issued an almost identical statement of support for him in October of last year, when a different wave of exit rumors followed a difficult run of results. Vasseur called that vote of confidence a welcome end to “the noise” at the time. A year later, the noise is back, the name attached to it is more concrete, and the pressure on results has not eased. Ferrari’s SF-26 has shown real pace in parts of this season, but a power unit deficit to Mercedes and Red Bull-Ford, combined with a cornering advantage that evaporated after the summer break, has left the team scrapping for second in the constructors’ standings rather than challenging for the title Vasseur was hired to deliver.
Behind the scenes, reporting around the Baku weekend named two internal candidates who could, in theory, ease any transition if Ferrari ever did move on from Vasseur: Antonello Coletta, who runs Ferrari’s World Endurance Championship program and has previously turned the top job down, and Jerome d’Ambrosio, Vasseur’s deputy and a member of his inner circle. Horner remains the external name generating the most attention, despite what has been described as resistance to the idea within parts of Ferrari’s own ranks.
What Comes Next
Vasseur has been careful not to frame any of this as a farewell tour. “We have still seven races to go, and I will push until the last corner,” he said in Baku, a line aimed squarely at anyone reading his position as already decided. He has run Ferrari since January 2023, arriving after Mattia Binotto’s exit with a reputation built on patience, a trait that first made him the right man to rebuild a struggling program and has since become the very thing some critics inside Italy use against him, reading his calm as detachment rather than discipline. Whether that reputation survives a fifth season at Ferrari likely depends less on any single race than on whether Ferrari closes the year in second place in the constructors’ championship or slips further back, and on whether Elkann’s statement of support this week proves any more durable than the one he issued twelve months ago.
For now, the job is still Vasseur’s, and the two drivers who owe their first big breaks to him are the ones standing closest behind him as he tries to keep it. That is not nothing in a sport where loyalty usually gets measured in lap times rather than history. But Horner’s name is not going away on its own, and neither is the question of what Ferrari actually wants from the final stretch of a season that was supposed to be a turning point and has instead become another test of Vasseur’s nerve.
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