Luigi Mazzola, a historic Ferrari engineer, has launched a devastating critique of Fred Vasseur’s technical management. Three years without a clear direction, Lewis Hamilton drifting in an incomprehensible car, and a development path focused on the wrong areas have all contributed to Ferrari becoming the fourth force in the 2025 championship. With the 2026 regulations approaching, Ferrari now risks carrying the same structural flaws that have already dragged the team down.
Ferrari’s 2025 season is not a simple stumble; it is the definitive proof that Fred Vasseur’s technical project is fundamentally flawed. Engineer Luigi Mazzola, who genuinely worked in Maranello and understands what winning organizations look like, does not limit himself to mild criticism. Instead, he dismantles the current model from the ground up.
His verdict is precise and uncompromising: today’s Ferrari is a team without technical leadership, without identity, and without courage.
Three years of Vasseur and zero direction: Ferrari no longer knows what it wants to become
Luigi Mazzola does not hide behind vague hints or diplomatic language:
“After three years, they have not managed to put the right people in the right positions. There has been no development.”
Fred Vasseur has had time, authority, and a free hand, yet he has built nothing of substance.
Today’s Ferrari lacks a clearly defined technical philosophy. It does not have a coherent development method, nor a rational decision-making process. What it does have is a long list of proclamations and an embarrassing final outcome: fourth force in the championship and a team in clear decline.
Hamilton adrift: the living proof of technical chaos
Nothing exposes the team’s structural weaknesses more clearly than the Lewis Hamilton case.
The seven-time world champion, a driver who should elevate any project through talent alone, has instead become:
- a ghost in qualifying,
- a driver trapped in a car he cannot understand,
- the clearest evidence that Ferrari no longer knows how to read a driver or build a car around him.
Luigi Mazzola states it without hesitation:
“The psycho-technical synergy between the engineers and Lewis Hamilton has not been created. Today, the race engineer has very little margin.”
This means only one thing:
Ferrari is ruled by a technical bureaucracy that prevents effective solutions from being found.
A system so rigid that it cannot even figure out how to make a seven-time world champion function properly.
And that is simply grotesque.
The wrong development path: money wasted without understanding the real problems
The decision to invest heavily in the rear suspension is, for Luigi Mazzola, the perfect symbol of a flawed methodology:
“I don’t understand why you would spend money on a suspension when, in Formula 1, aerodynamics are what really matter.”
In other words:
Ferrari is investing where it does not need to and neglecting what actually determines performance. The result is a fragile, unbalanced, incoherent car that fails to improve over the course of the season and does not meet the drivers’ needs. When a team gets the technical direction wrong, everything else is merely a consequence.
The great taboo: who really is in charge in Maranello?
The most explosive moment of Luigi Mazzola’s analysis comes with this statement:
“The car is a technical expression, not a financial one. And it comes from a technical direction.”
At Ferrari today, that technical direction does not exist.
Or it exists but does not make decisions. Or it makes decisions and gets them wrong. Or it is constantly overridden by people who should not be deciding in the first place. The result? A team that does not listen to its drivers, does not value its best engineers, and lives trapped inside a system that blocks any deviation from the preset line — even when that line leads straight into the abyss.
2026: technical revolution or farce?
The 2026 regulations should represent a golden opportunity for those who are currently behind. But Luigi Mazzola is crystal clear: without strong technical leadership, Ferrari has no guarantees of improvement.
“What guarantees are there that Ferrari can improve? That’s what leaves me unconvinced.”
In other words:
Maranello is heading into the most important year of the modern era with the same flaws that destroyed the team over the previous three-year period.
Others may get worse.
Ferrari? It could simply stand still.
And in Formula 1, standing still means falling backwards.
The real problem is not the car — it’s who leads it from the top
Luigi Mazzola’s criticism reads like a verdict:
Ferrari is not slow by accident.
Ferrari is slow because:
- it lacks authoritative technical leadership,
- it does not have a functioning structure,
- it lacks an effective decision-making process,
- it does not have the courage to break established patterns,
- it lacks leadership capable of turning resources into performance.
The question is no longer: “Can Ferrari improve?”
The real question is: “Does Ferrari have anyone capable of making it improve?”
Until that answer becomes clear, everything else will remain an illusion.
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