Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur says he is “not worried” about Lewis Hamilton’s struggles in his final season with Mercedes.
Hamilton officially joins Ferrari in the new year after a season in which George Russell comprehensively outperformed the seven-time champion in qualifying.
Russell finished 22 points ahead of Hamilton in the championship as each Mercedes driver won two grands prix.
Vasseur admitted Hamilton had had “tough moments” in qualifying but added that he was “never, never, never worried about the situation”.
The Frenchman pointed to Hamilton’s “very good races” in Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi at the end of the season and said he believed that the difficulty of handling his final season a Mercedes had an impact on his performances. Hamilton signed for Ferrari in January, more than a month before the 2024 season started.
Vasseur said: “I am really convinced, and I don’t want to blame Lewis or Mercedes, that this situation is not easy to manage and I can understand if it is not going well you can suffer in this relationship.
“He was not very well in his mind and he was clear about this in Brazil but he also did very well on the last couple of events and I am not worried at all.”
Managing Hamilton and Leclerc
Vasseur, who was speaking at Ferrari’s traditional Christmas media lunch, was instrumental in Hamilton joining Ferrari because of the pair’s long relationship since they worked together in the junior categories two decades ago.
Asked how he would handle the competitive tension between Hamilton and his new team-mate Charles Leclerc, Vasseur said this was “always a challenge” between drivers in the same team, but that it would push Ferrari forward.
“Charles, Lewis, I am not particularly worried about this,” Vasseur said. “They have a huge mutual respect, they know each other, they have been talking about this for months now.
“It is much better to fight for first and third or second and third than to fight for 19th and 20th. It is a good issue for a team to have this kind of discussion and approach and I am really convinced again that the performance of the team is coming from the emulation between the two.”
Assimilation into Ferrari
Vasseur admitted that Hamilton and the team faced another “challenge” in getting up to speed together in the two and a half months between his joining and the start of the season in Australia on 14-16 March.
Hamilton is due to drive a 2023 Ferrari early in the new year as he begins his work to assimilate into his new team.
Vasseur refused to give a date for this test, saying it was “closely linked to the weather”. It is expected to be at one of Ferrari’s test tracks, Fiorano at the factory or Mugello in Tuscany.
Ferrari have not given any further details of their plans for Hamilton before the official pre-season test in Bahrain on 26-28 February.
“It is not easy but he is coming with his own experience,” Vasseur said. “He is not the rookie of the year, I am not worried at all about this.
“We know that we have a lot of procedure to assimilate during this couple of days but he is experienced enough to do it.
“We have the advantage to have the simulator and he will be able to do a race simulation and a qualifying simulation in the simulator and to be fully prepared with the steering wheel and all the particularities of the car. But I am not worried about this and it is not the biggest challenge.”
Hamilton is expected to move into a property in Italy, likely in Milan, as part of his switch to Ferrari.
Vasseur, who like Hamilton does not speak Italian, said he had no advice to give him in terms of adapting to Italy and the new team other than “to avoid to take too much pasta, for the ballast”.
Looking forward to 2025
Ferrari will launch their 2025 car in Maranello on 19 January, the day after F1’s first official “season launch”, which is being held at the O2 in London.
Vasseur said Hamilton would have no further public engagements for the team.
“We have to be fully focused on the season,” he said. “It will be a very tight period between the first day and the launch and I want to have everybody fully focused on performance.
“We have the launch of the championship and the launch of the car. It is two events and for me it is far too much. Or it is far enough, let’s say. I want to be focused on development and performance and not on the show.”
And Vasseur spoke for the first time about his talks with Hamilton last winter that led to him joining Ferrari.
“In 2023 we won more races than Mercedes so it was not difficult to convince him Ferrari would be a good project,” he said.
“He had the project to drive for Ferrari in his mind for at least 22 or 23 years because we were discussing this in 2004. It was not too difficult.
“Sometimes it is also a matter of coincidence or to align all the planets, that he is on the market, that Ferrari have a seat available and so on. The contact was an easy one. We started to discuss one year ago and it was not difficult to convince him.”
Ferrari lost out on the constructors’ championship to McLaren by 14 points at the final race of 2024 and Vasseur said he expected next season to be another close fight between the top four teams, including Red Bull and Mercedes.
“What we have to do to win next year is about details,” he said. “We made good improvements in every area but we are still missing 14 points in the championship. It is a lot and almost nothing, it is a DNF, a race incident, a strategic decision.
“We are speaking about details on every single pillar. Every single mistake, every decision will make a huge decision. I am sure next year the championship will be also tight and we can’t let one point run away.”