MARANELLO, Italy — On the entry gates to Fiorano, Ferrari’s private test track at its headquarters in Maranello, a Spanish flag had been affixed by a fan with a note written in Italian across the middle.
“Chili, you are and you will always be a Ferrari driver, whatever your destiny is. I love you. Vamos. Good luck.”
It was a final thank you and farewell to Carlos Sainz — known to his fans as ‘Chili’ — who enjoyed his final outing as a Ferrari F1 driver on Tuesday. Under clear blue skies on a morning so crisp you could see your breath, Sainz took to the Fiorano test track alongside his dad, the rally great Carlos Sr., running side by side in Ferrari F1 cars. An emotional moment for father and son, even if their inner competitors could not stop a comparison of telemetry once they got out of the cockpit.
“It was the best way to thank all of them for what they did for the team,” Fred Vasseur, Ferrari’s team principal, said a few hours later ahead of the team’s annual media Christmas lunch.
Two generations, one track. Carlos Sainz and his dad, side by side#ScuderiaFerrari pic.twitter.com/2WfU2nNT6u
— Scuderia Ferrari HP (@ScuderiaFerrari) December 17, 2024
Twelve months earlier, at the same event, held in the very same room, Vasseur had been asked about his plans for Ferrari’s driver lineup beyond 2024 as both Sainz and Charles Leclerc neared the end of their contracts. Vasseur’s message, particularly to the enquiring Spanish journalists, was to be patient. “We have still 13 months in front of us,” he said at the time. “It’s quite comfortable.”
What happened next rocked F1. Vasseur and Ferrari swooped in for Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time world champion who’d only agreed to a new Mercedes contract six months prior. Instead, in February, Hamilton announced he’d join Ferrari 2025 on a multi-year deal. Sainz was left without a seat for next season before the current one had even started.
“It was not an easy situation for him when I had to give him the call in February,” Vasseur reflected. “You can imagine it was a tough situation. But he was able to keep the same approach all year, to be very professional, very dedicated, to fight until the last corner of the last lap of the last race.”
Sainz ended his time at Ferrari on a high, winning in Australia just 16 days after undergoing abdominal surgery — Vasseur personally found this the most emotional part of the season — and returning to the top step in Mexico. Alongside Leclerc, he helped Ferrari finish as runner-up in the constructors’ championship, just 14 points shy of McLaren. Without its midseason dip in form, it may have clinched its first title since 2008.
“Fourteen points, it’s a lot, and almost nothing,” Vasseur said.
All season long, Sainz raced knowing the final time he’d don the famous red Scuderia colors loomed ever closer. For Hamilton, there was the opposite emotion: that moment, the one he’d dreamed of since playing as Michael Schumacher on video games as a teenager, was coming increasingly into view.
Having completed his final farewells at Mercedes with visits to Kuala Lumpur and Stuttgart before a final homecoming to the factory in Brackley, Hamilton can now think more about his start to life with Ferrari. And as Sainz completed his last outing at Fiorano, Ferrari could also begin to prepare for the arrival of F1’s statistical all-time greatest driver.
Vasseur held court at Ferrari’s end of season media event this week. (Fabrizio Boldoni / DPPI)
There are only six weeks between the start of January and the first on-track outing for Ferrari’s 2025 car, set for a full launch and shakedown at Maranello on Feb. 19, for Hamilton to embed within Ferrari. “It’s not easy,” Vasseur said of the tight timeframe. “But I think he’s also coming with his own experience. He’s not the rookie of the year. It means that I’m not worried at all about this.”
Hamilton will be able to acclimate to Ferrari’s processes and systems, such as the steering wheel’s functions, in the simulator and by testing an older model under the Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) allowances, which looks set to mark his first outing in red early in the year.
Vasseur laughed when a journalist suggested they might be hard of hearing and had missed that crucial detail of when Hamilton’s first Ferrari test would take place. “Good try, but I say nothing!” he replied. All Vasseur would say is that it is “closely linked to the weather” — teams must give the FIA five days’ notice before any TPC run, and the weather in northern Italy around that time of year can be unpredictable.
Ferrari will also avoid doing any big, bespoke presentation to mark Hamilton’s arrival in January. “We have to be focused on the season,” Vasseur said. “As we said before, it will be a very tight period between the first day and launch; it’s a matter of weeks, and I want to have everybody focus on performance.”
Vasseur said he and Hamilton, who have been friends for more than 20 years, had been “a bit more cautious” in their contact this year, and there had been zero discussion of any technical aspects in respect of his commitments to Mercedes. But even as Ferrari puts together the team that will work around Hamilton and tries to create an environment that brings out the best in him, Vasseur was not looking to make it the same as what Hamilton had at Mercedes.
“I’m not sure that we have to do a copy-paste of what he did with Mercedes,” Vasseur said. “The environment worked very well at the beginning, a bit less at the end. It’s not for me to do a copy-paste of what he did in the past. We have to find the best way to manage Lewis. I know him pretty well, but I don’t want to do at all a copy-paste of what he did in the past.”
Mercedes struggled to get the best out of Hamilton in their final season together. He slumped to his lowest F1 championship finish yet and was soundly beaten by teammate George Russell in the standings. In December, Hamilton conceded in Abu Dhabi that he found it hard to manage his emotions during the difficult final year, unable to find those tenths in qualifying that once made all the difference.
Vasseur stressed he was “never, never, never worried” by Hamilton’s struggle for form through his final year at Mercedes. “I don’t want to blame Lewis or Mercedes, but this situation, it’s not easy to manage,” Vasseur said.
Leclerc and Hamilton battled a few times in their final races before becoming teammates. (ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP via Getty Images)
Vasseur was also unconcerned by the need to manage potential battles between Hamilton and Leclerc, who he thought was “in a better shape today than he was 12 months ago,” particularly by improving his race and weekend management. Leclerc bounced back from a winless 2023 to win three times, and boosted his points tally by 150 en route to P3 in the standings, making him a solid benchmark for Hamilton to compete against. “Charles, Lewis, I’m not particularly worried about this,” Vasseur said. “They have a huge mutual respect; they know each other, they are speaking about this for months now.
“It’s much better to fight for 1-2 or 2-3 on the grid than to fight for 19-20. And I think it’s a good issue for a team to have this kind of discussion, this kind of approach. I’m really convinced that the performance of the team is coming also from the emulation between the two.”
There will also be some more minor adaptations for Hamilton to make, given Ferrari’s unique culture as one of F1’s two Italian teams and its rich history. Vasseur joked that learning Italian was a “touchy point” for him, given he’s two years into the top job and still has yet to master the language, but he did not think it would be crucial for Hamilton’s performance given most meetings are conducted in English. The only advice he had to give Hamilton was to “avoid too much pasta,” laughing and patting his stomach.
For Vasseur, the focus is on helping Ferrari build on its progress through 2024 so it can go from challenging for a title to actually winning one. “We did a good step forward compared to 2023, I would say, on every single pillar,” Vasseur said. “Reliability was better, the strategy was good, pit stops went well, the performance was there. We scored 60 percent more points than one year ago, we have five wins against one. I think on all the KPIs, it’s green. The only one (down) is that we finished the season 14 points behind McLaren.”
The spotlight on Hamilton and his blockbuster move to Ferrari will be brighter than ever in the coming months, particularly when he makes his first official appearance in red. But after only just missing out on the championship this year, and with an even tighter battle at the front anticipated in 2025, Vasseur knows there can be nothing but total attention to detail.
“It’s a good lesson for everybody in the team because every single mistake, every single decision, will make a huge difference at the end,” Vasseur said. “Next year, I’m sure the championship will also be tight. We can’t let one point run away.”
Top photo of Lewis Hamilton and Fred Vasseur: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images, Ferrari
