Frédéric Vasseur says Ferrari spent too long trying not to be exposed when he arrived, and he is now pushing the team to stop playing safe if it wants more pace. The Ferrari team principal said the first thing that shocked him was the gap the team carried on every topic because it did not want to show weakness, and he argued that small choices on weight, fuel and bodywork can still decide races.
Ferrari has already run the Macarena rear wing, the exhaust wing and winglets on its halo this season, a sign of how far the team has gone in search of clever gains. Vasseur’s case is that the gain from taking a bolder approach can be real even when the change looks tiny on the car, because a kilo more weight, half or a litre more fuel, or one extra step of caution in opening the sidepod can add up to two tenths.
That is why he says the team should not be shy about new ideas. Vasseur said Ferrari never blames someone if a proposal does not work, and he wants everyone inside the operation to think of themselves as a performance contributor. He said that mindset is already showing up on the car in some examples, with more to come, and that the measure of success is simple: lap time.
The shift matters because Ferrari has been described this season as a trailblazer for smart design tricks in Formula 1, but Vasseur is framing the story less as a burst of creativity than as a change in culture. He said the team had been too cautious when he joined and that the instinct was to avoid being exposed, even if that meant carrying hidden losses. His answer is not reckless risk-taking. It is a narrower, more disciplined willingness to test ideas and accept that innovation has a cost before it has a payoff.
Vasseur also tied that push to Loic Serra, who arrived as Ferrari technical director in October 2024. He said Serra shares the same performance-first mindset and that the pair are trying to convince the team that every department can contribute to speed, not just the obvious engineering groups. In his view, that matters because the margins are so thin. He said the average gap between Ferrari and the car in front of it last year was three hundredths of a second, which means even one tenth can reshape a season.
There is still a tension in Vasseur’s message. Ferrari wants to be open to proposals, but it is also operating in a sport where the cost of the wrong idea can be obvious on Sundays. He warned not to overestimate what he said, but the direction is clear: Ferrari is trying to turn caution into speed, and in Formula 1 that can be the difference between looking inventive and actually winning.
