Why Vasseur is the right man to lead Ferrari’s F1 revival

Ever since reports arose in the days leading up to the Abu Dhabi season finale that Mattia Binotto was on his way out at Maranello, and that Vasseur had been identified as the man to replace him, the winds have been blowing one way.

It marks the greatest challenge to date of Vasseur’s long and largely successful career in motorsport. He’ll now face the pressures of not only a team, but a nation. Where Stefano Domenicali, Marco Mattiacci, Maurizio Arrivabene and Binotto all failed, Vasseur must now succeed by ending Ferrari’s championship drought.

And he is exactly the right man for the job.

Vasseur will enter a Ferrari team that is dealing with a big mix of emotions off the back of its 2022 campaign. While it was a missed opportunity to sustain a fight against Red Bull for the championship, it nevertheless marked a true return to being competitive again.

A first win in two-and-a-half years plus a solid baseline car gave good optimism for the future.

Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna’s comment in an interview with CNBC that he was “not satisfied with second place, because second is first of the losers” seemed to underestimate the progress that had been made this year. Sure, the year didn’t give Ferrari what it wanted, but it was still its best campaign since 2018.

It meant the split with Binotto was one that was not without huge risk. Not only did Ferrari lose its team principal, but it also lost its technical chief – Binotto was never replaced when he stepped up from the role of chief technical officer. Unlike its previous changes in team boss, there also wasn’t a clear successor in-house, prompting it to look elsewhere and end up with Vasseur.

The time it will naturally take to get up to speed and understand the workings of the Ferrari machine, the most complex in F1, makes it a big ask to get things right the first time around in 2023.

A mindset that Ferrari needs

Vasseur is very much a realist. He won’t be going into Ferrari expecting to click his fingers and make it a success from the word go, but there will be a clear sense of how he does and does not want things to work.

A sign of this came when he arrived at Sauber as team principal in 2017. Within an hour of starting the job, he’d already cancelled the planned engine deal with Honda for 2018, so confident he was it was the wrong direction to go in.

Being so clinical may be a different proposition within a…