Frédéric Vasseur is a French motorsport executive and engineer who has served as Team Principal of Scuderia Ferrari since 2023. He was born Frédéric Jean Henri Vasseur on 28 May 1968 in Draveil, Essonne, and raised in Paris. ¹

Education and early career

Vasseur studied automotive engineering at ESTACA, the French aeronautics and automotive engineering school, graduating in 1995. While still a student he founded RPM in 1992, preparing Formula 3 engines for Renault, the first step in a career spent building and running racing teams rather than driving for them. ¹

“" Vasseur is the steady hand charged with turning Ferrari's recent near-misses into championships.”

Building ASM and ART Grand Prix

He founded the team ASM in 1996, which became a force in Formula Three, winning the F3 Euro Series four years running from 2004 to 2007 with drivers including Lewis Hamilton in 2005. In 2004 he co-founded ART Grand Prix with Nicolas Todt, and the outfit immediately dominated the new GP2 Series, winning back-to-back titles with Nico Rosberg in 2005 and Hamilton in 2006, and later with Nico Hülkenberg and Stoffel Vandoorne. ³ Vasseur also founded Spark Racing Technology in 2013, which became the official chassis constructor for Formula E from its first season. ¹

Formula 1: Renault and Sauber

Vasseur entered Formula 1 as Renault's team principal in 2016, upon the manufacturer's works return, but resigned after a single season over a difference in vision with managing director Cyril Abiteboul. It was on leaving Renault that he set out the philosophy he has carried ever since: "If you want to perform in F1, you need to have one leader in the team and one single way." ³ He then took over Sauber (later Alfa Romeo) in mid-2017, succeeding Monisha Kaltenborn, and led the Swiss team for six seasons. There he gave Charles Leclerc his F1 debut in 2018, in a rookie season in which the young Monégasque scored the bulk of the team's points, then engineered a swap that sent Leclerc to Ferrari and brought Kimi Räikkönen to Sauber for 2019, steadily rebuilding the operation and securing the Alfa Romeo title partnership. ¹

Ferrari

Vasseur joined Ferrari in January 2023, named to replace Mattia Binotto as Team Principal, and became the second Frenchman to lead the Scuderia. He inherited a team that had not won a World Championship since 2008 and set about steadying its famously volatile culture and rebuilding its technical structure. In his first season, Carlos Sainz's win at the 2023 Singapore Grand Prix was the only non-Red Bull victory of an otherwise dominant Red Bull year. ¹ In 2024 the progress became clear: Ferrari took a one-two in Australia, won races with both Sainz and Leclerc, and pushed McLaren hard for the 2024 Constructors' Championship, leading it for stretches before finishing runner-up by just 14 points at the Abu Dhabi finale. ⁴

A testing 2025 and a contract extension

2025 was harder. Ferrari signed Lewis Hamilton alongside Leclerc but the SF-25 proved winless in Grands Prix, the team taking only a Hamilton Sprint win and a single pole all year and slipping to fourth in the Constructors' Championship. Italian media speculation about Vasseur's future intensified through the spring, and at the Canadian Grand Prix he angrily called the reports "disrespectful." Ferrari ended the talk on 31 July 2025, the eve of the Hungarian Grand Prix, by handing him a multi-year contract extension; CEO Benedetto Vigna said the deal "reflects our trust in Fred's leadership." ²

The 2026 reset

The sweeping 2026 chassis and power unit regulations offered Vasseur the reset he needed, a clean-sheet rulebook he framed as "a completely new journey" carrying "a number of unknowns." Ferrari's SF-26 has been markedly more competitive, sitting second in the Constructors' Championship behind a dominant Mercedes through the opening rounds, with podiums for both drivers and a landmark maiden Ferrari victory for Hamilton at the Spanish Grand Prix. ⁵ The team's main remaining weakness has been a straight-line power deficit to Mercedes, which Vasseur has acknowledged openly while resisting the temptation to over-promise, the calm-under-pressure approach that earned him his extension. ⁵

Management style and relationships

Vasseur is regarded as a calm, people-focused leader who lowers the political temperature around the famously pressured Ferrari operation. Leclerc has praised him as "super good at putting the people in the best possible condition in order for them to perform at their best." ³ His relationships with his drivers run unusually deep: he has followed Leclerc since karting through the Todt connection, and managed Hamilton in F3 and GP2, with Hamilton saying the Ferrari move "wouldn't have happened without him." ³

Bottom line

Vasseur is the steady hand charged with turning Ferrari's recent near-misses into championships. Why he matters: having weathered the pressure of 2025 with a fresh contract, he now has a genuinely competitive car under the new rules, and the credibility with his drivers and engineers to lead a Scuderia still chasing its first title since 2008. ²