Gino Rosato: “Working at Ferrari is not easy, sometimes it’s 60% politics and only 40% work”. Former Ferrari figure Gino Rosato says keeping Frédéric Vasseur was crucial.

Words from a former Ferrari insider
Scuderia Ferrari heads into the summer break of the 2025 Formula 1 season without a single Grand Prix victory to its name so far. However, the team has recently confirmed the contract extension of team principal Frédéric Vasseur. His current deal, originally set to expire at the end of the year, has now been renewed on a multi-year basis — not merely for the 2026 season, but for a longer-term project.

According to Gino Rosato, a longtime member of the Ferrari organisation and once a foundational figure in the team — with a brief stint at Lotus during his career — not renewing Frédéric Vasseur’s contract would have been a critical and costly mistake on the part of Ferrari’s top management. Gino Rosato argued that such a decision would have set the team back once again after years of instability:
“In the past 14 years, Ferrari has already gone through five different team principals, which means an average tenure of less than three years per person. Letting Vasseur go would have meant throwing away another two or three seasons and restarting from scratch all over again. Maurizio Arrivabene came very close to winning and was still dismissed. Mattia Binotto also got very close and he too was removed from his position. And what about Stefano Domenicali? Who in their right mind could have thought it was a good idea to get rid of Stefano Domenicali in 2014 just because things weren’t going well at the time?”
These were the thoughts shared by Rosato during his guest appearance on the Formula 1 talk show Pitstop.

Politics over performance
Gino Rosato also emphasized how challenging it can be to work at Ferrari’s Maranello headquarters, particularly when compared to the culture inside UK-based Formula 1 teams. Unlike the more streamlined and focused environments found in British teams, Gino Rosato explained that internal politics play a much more significant role in Ferrari’s day-to-day operations — often to the detriment of actual performance and engineering work.

“Maranello is not an easy place to work,” Gino Rosato said. “I have also worked at Lotus, and in a British team the balance between actual work and internal politics is usually about 70% to 30%. But at Ferrari, it can be the opposite — sometimes politics takes up as much as 60% of everything that goes on.”

These remarks shed light on the unique pressures and dynamics within Italy’s most iconic motorsport institution, where political considerations, internal factions, and high-level expectations often complicate the technical and sporting goals of the team. For Gino Rosato, keeping a steady and competent leader like Frédéric Vasseur in place is essential if Ferrari wants to move forward and eventually return to winning ways in Formula 1.