It’s official, Ferrari has a new sporting director, Fred Vasseur, who will join Scuderia Ferrari on January 9 as General Manager and Team Principal.
Early this morning Alfa Romeo made Vasseur’s departure official and a few minutes later Ferrari announced what had been expected for at least a month. For his position, Jost Capito sounds strong, who yesterday ended his relationship with Williams F1, and even Andreas Seidl, from McLaren, although with him the Audi F1 option gains more strength, a project that is now starting with a view to 2026 and that is linked to Alfa-Sauber itself.
With more than 25 years of experience, Vasseur, a 54-year-old aeronautical engineer, started in junior formulas by founding the ASM team in the mid-1990s, which achieved great success in Formula 3 and for the last decade in Formula 3. Formula 1. During this time, he has also been widely recognized for his success in nurturing talent winning GP2 no less than in 2005 (Nico Rosberg) and 2006 (Lewis Hamilton).
Vasseur most recently held the position of CEO and Team Principal of Sauber Motorsport (currently Alfa Romeo F1 Team) since 2017. Before this, he was the Team Principal of the Renault F1 Team in 2016. His most pressing assignment, ending the drought of team titles since 2007 in drivers and 2008 in constructors. In the effort, Domenicali, Mattiacci, Arrivabene, and Binotto were left behind, who did not overcome the curse of an Italian at the head of the Scuderia -Binotto is born in Switzerland, but of transalpine descent-. We will see if the first foreigner after Jean Todt and equally French, is the one who returns to glory in the team in which Carlos Sainz plays..
Intimate of the Todt family, the father former boss of Ferrari and president of the FIA , and his son Nicholas, co-founder of ART and representative of drivers and among them Charles Leclerc, the position of the Monegasque in the team is reinforced with a two-year contract still at Ferrari, until the end of 2024, the same as Sainz himself. Not surprisingly, Charles was the GP3 champion with him in 2016 and his driver at Sauber in 2018.
