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After a winless 2025 campaign that saw Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton finish 5th and 6th in the standings, Scuderia Ferrari HP team principal Frédéric Vasseur remains confident that he can rely on a unique mixture of leadership, data and gut intuition to lead his team out of the wilderness.
Scuderia Ferrari HP entered the 2026 season opener in Melbourne with renewed momentum, securing a 1-2 finish in the first practice session and placing 2nd and 3rd in final practice behind George Russell.
On the eve of practice, and entering a somewhat unknown new world of rules and regulations, Scuderia Ferrari HP’s team principal Frédéric Vasseur sat down with Man of Many and Chivas Regal to discuss the weight of responsibility that comes with managing tifosi—it’s legion of global fans—leading large teams who are situated around the world, and when to follow gut instinct over raw data.
Frédéric Vasseur on the Philosophy of Leadership
Man of Many: How do you view the responsibility of individual team members in a massive organisation like Ferrari?
Vasseur: “The key message for me when I joined was clearly that everybody is a performance contributor. Everybody is part of the result, everybody is owning the result, good or bad, and not to expect that performance could come from someone else.”
Man of Many: You often mention the “invisible” part of the team. Why is that group so critical?
Vasseur: “F1 is a strange animal… 90% of the team members will never travel, they will never come on track… but performance is coming from the others, not only, but largely from the others. We need to reinforce the message: ‘Guys at home, you are a performance contributor.’”
On Trusting Your Gut in a Data-Driven Sport
Man of Many: Formula 1 is obsessed with data. Does human intuition still have a seat at the table?
Vasseur: “It’s managed by data but not only… even if you do thousands of simulations, at one stage you have someone with the finger on the button who has to push for the pit stop. This is not only managed by data; it’s sometimes managed by—always partially managed by—feeling. Or you can call experience.”
Man of Many: Why is it important to keep the “human factor” in the equation?
Vasseur: “I love to keep part of the human factor into the equation, not just based on data and managed by a robot there… The human factor is still key to adapt to the circumstances, to the external factors.”
On Leading Through Difficult Times
Man of Many: How do you handle the high-pressure environment and the volatility of F1 results?
Vasseur: “My job is more to have a consistent approach, not to overreact to results, not to consider that we could be world champion after a good FP1 and not that we are nowhere after a tough weekend.”
Man of Many: Is “perfection” the ultimate goal for the Scuderia?
Vasseur: “If you start to speak with the team about perfection, I think you are dead… If you are happy with what you are doing today, you are dead. It’s the beginning of the end. You need to keep this capacity of innovation, improvement, continuous improvement.”
On the Ferrari Culture and the Tifosi
Man of Many: What makes leading Ferrari different from any other team in the pit lane?
Vasseur: “I have more fans and more Tifosi in front of the entrance of Ferrari in one day than in ten years in another team… even when we don’t get the result expected, they are there. They are there to push us.”
Man of Many: How do you manage the “over-motivation” that comes with the Ferrari brand?
Vasseur: “Into the team the exercise is more to calm them down than to motivate them. I think I have more team members over-motivated than under-motivated.”
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