2026 Scuderia Ferrari HP F1 Team

[deadhead]

How many failed rebuilds will it take for people to understand the problem with Ferrari has always been above Adami's, Serra's or even Vasseur's pay grade?

While some things are out of Serra and Vasseur's control, there's still many things well within their power to improve on. Communication between the team and drivers during races is an example of this.

That being said there's already been improvement in this area since Vasseur came on board.

The only improvement is the pit crew performance

[Peter Ian Staker]

So what are you proposing the team to do? NOT improving anything that is not directly related to changing the whole political governance and power structure.

Sounds like a great plan. Why improve anything at all, from the engineering to the operations part. It's of no use anyways, right? Might as well quit F1 altogether.

You seem to believe Ferrari would quit F1 before it improves its governance or team culture and honestly I can’t blame you at this point.

[ScuderiaLeo]

The only improvement is the pit crew performance

Strategy, communication especially what the drivers are allowed to say, and as I said Bozzi as a replacement have all had an improvement under Vasseur.

Of course the team still makes mistakes, far more than what is acceptable for a team of their supposed level but to say pit crew is the "only" improvement is an exaggeration.

[AR3-GP]

Ferrari technical team is probably one of the weakest in Formula 1 at the moment, at least on paper. They appointed Loic Serra who has 0 experience as a Technical Director. He doesn't know the car as a whole, coming from a "cinematic" background (tyres and suspensions), he has almost no on track experience as well, etc. How can you compete when the others have Newey or Rob Marshal? The difference in their CVs is immense.

Every engineer has to start somewhere.

Ferrari needs established engineers rather than ones in the making.

Not getting the current Aston Martin team principal was a huge mistake.

The past can't be changed. Let's wait and see. If they do a good job, then assumptions will change.

[Xyz22]

Ferrari technical team is probably one of the weakest in Formula 1 at the moment, at least on paper. They appointed Loic Serra who has 0 experience as a Technical Director. He doesn't know the car as a whole, coming from a "cinematic" background (tyres and suspensions), he has almost no on track experience as well, etc. How can you compete when the others have Newey or Rob Marshal? The difference in their CVs is immense.

Every engineer has to start somewhere.

Absolutely, but Ferrari is not the right place, especially now.

[Xyz22]

How many failed rebuilds will it take for people to understand the problem with Ferrari has always been above Adami's, Serra's or even Vasseur's pay grade?

While some things are out of Serra and Vasseur's control, there's still many things well within their power to improve on. Communication between the team and drivers during races is an example of this.

That being said there's already been improvement in this area since Vasseur came on board.

The only improvement is the pit crew performance

Apparently that is due to the work done by Diego Ioverno.
As i said, leaders are just too important. You can have a tremendous pit crew, but without the right leader they wouldn't perform well.

[edu2703]

I think you are just negative.
Fred did not say they will start slow or they will be P10 at the start... And of course he does not know either.
He said, correctly, that the cars will develop the fastest since many seasons... So the one who will be able the best in that catching up and developing race, might be the winner in 2026, where he is completely right.
Even if you win the first race, with that car you will be probably the last at the end of the season with no development.

Teams will see tons of solutions on other cars that is new to them, and they will first see truly how their car works in real race situations. So Fred is 100% correct.

Rarely does anything change. In 2009, 2014, and 2022, the championship was fought amongst those teams on the podium in the first race. The first race in a new regulation set has a great significance, contrary to what Frederick Vasseur claims. That is when each team's concept is put to the test and that is when those teams who understand the regulations reveal themselves, and the same for those who do not.

Those teams who arrive with a good car in the first weekend are already showing that they have understood the regulations. That also means they are best placed to understand how to develop the car. Those teams that arrive with bad concepts in Melbourne are unlikely to overturn a performance deficit because if you have misunderstood the regulations from the outset, how can you out develop a team that understands them?

Personally, I believe the Australian GP will give a good initial idea of ​​how the pecking order will be under the new regulations, but I won't declare the championship fight will only be between the teams on the podium in that race.

With a change in regulations, it's very important to achieve a good result right from the start, because this shows that the team is among those that best understand the new regulations and can then focus on updates to improve the car's concept instead of having a bad result, wasting time trying to find the problem and trying to fix it during the season. If the problem is inherent to the car's concept itself, you can throw the whole season away and focus on a completely new car for 2027, because no update will solve that.

Updates help, but they don't work miracles. A team that has a terrible start to the season, starting at the back of the grid, is very unlikely to reach the Top 5 by the end of the season. The same can be said for WCC chances for the team that finishes the first 4-5 races of 2026 without a single podium.

[AR3-GP]

New year, new life, and for those who love F1, all-new cars too.
I totally agree with Pat Symonds, we'll have race cars that stutter and start and other collateral problems to face.
The factories are back up and running; starting tomorrow, we begin to talk about it seriously.

Ferrari news incoming?

[Peter Ian Staker]

Ferrari needs established engineers rather than ones in the making.

Not getting the current Aston Martin team principal was a huge mistake.

It’s not like they haven’t tried recruiting the big name, it’s just none of them seem to want to come.
I doubt Newey to Ferrari was ever a real thing beyond his people using Ferrari as leverage to negotiate with Aston.

[LM10]

Ferrari technical team is probably one of the weakest in Formula 1 at the moment, at least on paper. They appointed Loic Serra who has 0 experience as a Technical Director. He doesn't know the car as a whole, coming from a "cinematic" background (tyres and suspensions), he has almost no on track experience as well, etc. How can you compete when the others have Newey or Rob Marshal? The difference in their CVs is immense.

Get your facts right before spewing hate. Rob Marshall had no experience as a Technical Director too before going to McLaren.

It’s almost an insult to Serra’s career to say he has no on track experience. Completely contrary to what you say he’s had some extensive on track experience for many years in F1. He was the performance director of Mercedes from 2018 on, for god’s sake. Played one of the key roles in Mercedes’ dominant era. He’s an excellent engineer and an expert on vehicle dynamics. The perfect man to put everything together - which was his job as a performance engineer.

Before you come up with a complete nonsense of an argument like “the 2025 Ferrari was bad, so Serra is bad” - he’s probably had almost no influence on that car.

[deadhead]

Yeah maybe they can make the tires work properly again…

Imagine that!

[DoctorRadio]

Ferrari technical team is probably one of the weakest in Formula 1 at the moment, at least on paper. They appointed Loic Serra who has 0 experience as a Technical Director. He doesn't know the car as a whole, coming from a "cinematic" background (tyres and suspensions), he has almost no on track experience as well, etc. How can you compete when the others have Newey or Rob Marshal? The difference in their CVs is immense.

Get your facts right before spewing hate. Rob Marshall had no experience as a Technical Director too before going to McLaren.

It’s almost an insult to Serra’s career to say he has no on track experience. Completely contrary to what you say he’s had some extensive on track experience for many years in F1. He was the performance director of Mercedes from 2018 on, for god’s sake. Played one of the key roles in Mercedes’ dominant era. He’s an excellent engineer and an expert on vehicle dynamics. The perfect man to put everything together - which was his job as a performance engineer.

Before you come up with a complete nonsense of an argument like “the 2025 Ferrari was bad, so Serra is bad” - he’s probably had almost no influence on that car.

[f1isgood]

Ferrari technical team is probably one of the weakest in Formula 1 at the moment, at least on paper. They appointed Loic Serra who has 0 experience as a Technical Director. He doesn't know the car as a whole, coming from a "cinematic" background (tyres and suspensions), he has almost no on track experience as well, etc. How can you compete when the others have Newey or Rob Marshal? The difference in their CVs is immense.

Get your facts right before spewing hate. Rob Marshall had no experience as a Technical Director too before going to McLaren.

It’s almost an insult to Serra’s career to say he has no on track experience. Completely contrary to what you say he’s had some extensive on track experience for many years in F1. He was the performance director of Mercedes from 2018 on, for god’s sake. Played one of the key roles in Mercedes’ dominant era. He’s an excellent engineer and an expert on vehicle dynamics. The perfect man to put everything together - which was his job as a performance engineer.

Before you come up with a complete nonsense of an argument like “the 2025 Ferrari was bad, so Serra is bad” - he’s probably had almost no influence on that car.

McLaren were also already in the rise before Marshall showed up as well. But some people are well known to attribute all and every success of any team to one person... ignoring the thousands of smart people who are also part of the team.

[Xyz22]

Ferrari technical team is probably one of the weakest in Formula 1 at the moment, at least on paper. They appointed Loic Serra who has 0 experience as a Technical Director. He doesn't know the car as a whole, coming from a "cinematic" background (tyres and suspensions), he has almost no on track experience as well, etc. How can you compete when the others have Newey or Rob Marshal? The difference in their CVs is immense.

Get your facts right before spewing hate. Rob Marshall had no experience as a Technical Director too before going to McLaren.

It’s almost an insult to Serra’s career to say he has no on track experience. Completely contrary to what you say he’s had some extensive on track experience for many years in F1. He was the performance director of Mercedes from 2018 on, for god’s sake. Played one of the key roles in Mercedes’ dominant era. He’s an excellent engineer and an expert on vehicle dynamics. The perfect man to put everything together - which was his job as a performance engineer.

Before you come up with a complete nonsense of an argument like “the 2025 Ferrari was bad, so Serra is bad” - he’s probably had almost no influence on that car.

Who decided to invest 3 months of development to introduce a new suspension that didn't bring any significant amount of performance then?
This was his first decision as Technical Director of Ferrari and was completely wrong. I don't think Serra is a bad engineer, at all actually. I think he would have been a super hire in an already well-structured team and Ferrari is everything but that at the moment.

Let's see what he does this season. Hopefully i'm completely wrong about him.

[dialtone]

Some wild takes in here the last few days.

The LEC and HAM engineers are absolutely not the problem. Espcially Bozzi but even HAM has had some dumb takes on the radio like asking Adami to not confirm his messages.. like wtf, even reddit was defending Adami on that one.

Strategy has been top notch since Vasseur, understanding of the tires during the race was a huge weakness before and became a strength in 2024+ (see Monza victory 2024). Pits have been flawless. There has been some serious clown shows from certain cars winning races in the past year.

On the leadership side they seem weaker, I may even agree with that, but attributing that to Loic Serra and his 3 months work on a suspension is just weird, he wasn’t even supposed to touch the 2025 car.

Either due to budget or other reasons at the end of 2024 they decided to not fully validate their ideas on the new floor and that doomed their 2025 season, it’s still unknown what happened in 2025 though, we speculated it was suspension related and rigidity of it, but the suspension might have had nothing to do with it, except for an attempt to fix it. Clearly the problem was at minimum also the floor.

And you can’t compare this to 2014, the changes in this year are much bigger than in 2014, huge changes in chassis, aero and engine all at once unlike 2014 which was really mostly and engine change and the reason people couldn’t catch up quickly then was the development tokens, even if you knew exactly what to do, you couldn’t do it.