John Elkann didn’t come to Amsterdam to throw bouquets at Ferrari’s Formula 1 operation. He came with the kind of carefully weighted language that tells you Maranello has spent the winter not just redesigning a car for a new rules era, but recalibrating how it wants to sound in public after a bruising 2025.
“Unity and determination” was the line to shareholders this week — and it lands differently in April 2026 than it would’ve done a year ago. Not because Ferrari suddenly looks invincible, but because the early-season evidence suggests the team has at least stopped bleeding points from self-inflicted wounds. Three races into the new championship, Ferrari has three podiums: Charles Leclerc third in Australia and Japan, Lewis Hamilton third in China for his first top-three finish in red. No wins yet, but a platform. And in this new regulatory landscape, a platform matters.
Elkann’s insistence on unity is also a neat piece of scene-setting after his own words became part of the story late last season. In the aftermath of Brazil 2025, he was criticised in some corners for telling Hamilton and Leclerc to “focus on driving” and “talk less,” while labelling Ferrari’s performance “not up to par.” It was a chairman speaking like a disappointed tifoso, and even if plenty inside the factory privately agreed with the sentiment, it’s rarely helpful when the most powerful figure at the company starts sounding like the post-race radio.
Now, the message has been repackaged: yes, Ferrari fell short of its ambitions in 2025 — it ended up winless for the first time since 2021 and logged its third such season of the decade — but the response is framed as collective and forward-facing, not corrective and personal.
“At Scuderia Ferrari, we know that racing is also about learning and improving,” Elkann said. “After a season that fell short of our ambitions, in 2026 we embarked on a new championship under new rules. We are approaching it with unity and determination, focused on the work needed to come back stronger.”
If it reads like corporate polish, that’s because it is. But it’s also a tacit acknowledgement that Ferrari can’t afford a 2026 defined by noise. With a new set of regulations, the margins shift, the development curves are steeper, and teams that burn energy on internal friction generally end up paying for it on Sundays.
Ferrari’s other racing programme is providing Elkann with a useful contrast — one he used before, and leaned on again. The World Endurance Championship operation delivered a drivers’ and manufacturers’ title double in 2025, plus a third straight Le Mans victory with the 499P. Elkann called the Bahrain finale on November 8 “pure joy,” noting it came 50 years after Ferrari’s last overall world title in endurance racing. It’s an easy narrative hook: when Ferrari looks joined-up, it wins.
The subtext, though, is that Ferrari wants its F1 team to borrow the WEC operation’s discipline as much as its trophies. The constant temptation in Maranello is to treat every shortfall as a drama rather than a diagnosis. Elkann’s line — “Ferrari wins when it is united” — is an attempt to turn that impulse into a guiding principle, not a slogan deployed after the damage is done.
Benedetto Vigna, Ferrari’s CEO, kept things blunt on the motorsport side. “In the world of racing, our goal remains simple: we race to win,” he said, while also laying out broader company plans leading toward 2030 and a product cadence of around four new models per year between 2026 and 2030 across petrol, hybrid and electric powertrains.
For the F1 team, “race to win” is the only phrase anyone ever really wants to hear — but it’s also the one that carries the most risk if the on-track reality doesn’t keep up. The first three rounds suggest Ferrari is close enough to speak ambitiously without sounding delusional. The problem is that Mercedes has looked like the benchmark, and Ferrari itself has been candid about where it’s losing time.
Fred Vasseur has conceded straight-line speed remains an area of focus as Ferrari tries to close on what has been described as a dominant Mercedes. Hamilton, now on the inside of the comparison, put it in driver terms: Mercedes takes a “huge step” on the straights, with George Russell and Kimi Antonelli enjoying “a little bit more deployment” and “less de-rating at the end of the straights.”
That’s the sort of detail that tells you this isn’t just about drag or wing level; it’s about how effectively the car can spend its energy and how late it can keep doing it. And it’s why Ferrari’s next on-track opportunity matters more than the usual mid-season PR run.
After Hamilton’s two-day Pirelli tyre test at Fiorano last week, Ferrari is scheduled to use one of its two permitted filming days at Monza on April 22, ahead of racing resuming with the Miami Grand Prix on May 3. Monza, with its long straights and heavy energy demands, is a pretty honest place to interrogate any 2026 power unit and deployment behaviour. Even within the constraints of a filming day, the value is obvious: gather the right data, validate the right models, and give the engineers one less unknown before the next development push.
For all the talk of unity, this is where Ferrari’s season will really be decided — not in speeches to shareholders, nor in retrospective comparisons with a wildly successful endurance programme, but in the cold weekly rhythm of solving the specific deficits that keep it on the podium rather than on the top step.
The early points haul has bought Ferrari a little breathing space. Elkann’s softer framing buys it a little political space. The difficult part is turning both into the only currency that ultimately counts at Ferrari: wins.
