Frederic Vasseur will join Ferrari as team principal in January and will be replaced by McLaren boss Andreas Seidl, who will head up Audi’s nascent Formula 1 programme at Alfa Romeo/Sauber.
The Frenchman, 54, who has been Alfa Romeo/Sauber’s managing director since 2017, will replace Mattia Binotto.
Vasseur will be charged with turning the Italian team into one capable of winning the world championship.
German Seidl, 46, has been McLaren’s team principal since 2019.
In 2022 Ferrari squandered a car that started the year as the fastest through a series of operational and reliability issues.
Ferrari chief executive officer Benedetto Vigna said: “Throughout his career, Fred has successfully combined his technical strengths as a trained engineer with a consistent ability to bring out the best in his drivers and teams.
“This approach and his leadership are what we need to push Ferrari forward with renewed energy.”
Vasseur, who will join Ferrari on 9 January, said he was “delighted and honoured” to take on the leadership of Ferrari.
“As someone who has held a lifelong passion for motorsport, Ferrari has always represented the very pinnacle of the racing world to me,” he said.
“I look forward to working with the talented and truly passionate team in Maranello to honour the history and heritage of the Scuderia and deliver for our tifosi around the world.”
A change in approach
Vasseur’s appointment marks a clean break from Ferrari’s strategy of choosing team principals over the last decade and a half.
Since Jean Todt, who masterminded the dominant Michael Schumacher era, left at the end of 2007, Ferrari has looked from within for the leaders of their F1 operations.
Todt’s replacement Stefano Domenicali was promoted from sporting director and when he left in 2014, the new man was Marco Mattiacci, who was head of Ferrari North America.
Mattiacci lasted just nine months before being replaced by Maurizio Arrivabene, who was a senior executive for the team’s title sponsor Philip Morris and has been close to the team’s operations for 20 years.
Arrivabene was replaced at the end of 2018 – following a season with similarities to 2022, when team mistakes, coupled with driver errors from Sebastian Vettel torpedoed their title challenge – by long-time employee Binotto.
He is an engineer who had worked his way up the ranks to become the first boss of the engine department and then technical director of both chassis and engine organisations.
In Vasseur, Ferrari have chosen a man steeped in motorsport management who, along with his stints as team boss at two different F1 outfits, has also enjoyed success in the junior categories with the ART team.
Vasseur also has a close relationship with Ferrari’s lead driver Charles Leclerc, whose growing frustrations with the way the team was operating in 2022 were transparent as his title challenge fell apart.
Vasseur ran Leclerc in GP3 in 2016 and Formula 2 in 2017, winning the title in both seasons, and also oversaw the Monegasque’s debut season in F1 with Sauber in 2018.
Last week, Leclerc spoke of his admiration for Vasseur while accepting his trophy for second place in the championship at the FIA Gala in Bologna.
He said: “Ferrari is a very different team to any other teams. I can only comment on my experience with Fred, which has been good.
“I worked with him from the junior categories, he has believed in me and we have always had a good relationship. This should not influence the decisions. He has always been very straightforward and very honest, which is something I liked.”
Vasseur’s key responsibility will be to ensure Ferrari’s race operations are improved so the team can avoid the sort of strategic errors that rocked Leclerc’s 2022 season.
Glaring mistakes on strategy deprived him of likely wins in Monaco, at Silverstone and in Hungary in 2022.
