Jean Alesi has waded into Ferrari’s latest bout of leadership noise with a pretty clear message: stop looking over the fence. In his view, Fred Vasseur is the right man to steer Maranello through Formula 1’s new era, and the idea that Ferrari should be plotting a move for Andrea Stella is more distraction than solution.
The Stella talk has bubbled up in the wake of McLaren’s announcement that Gianpiero Lambiase will join the team as chief racing officer, arriving “no later than 2028” once his Red Bull contract runs out. Lambiase, Verstappen’s long-time race engineer, is expected to sit beneath Stella in the structure, reporting directly into the McLaren team principal.
That appointment sparked the predictable chain reaction: if McLaren is bringing in a heavyweight, then surely someone must be heading out — and with Stella’s Ferrari past, the romance writes itself. The reality, though, is far less dramatic. McLaren has been consistent internally and publicly that Stella’s position isn’t changing, and there’s no sense of a surprise Maranello return being plotted behind the scenes.
Zak Brown’s wording didn’t exactly leave wiggle room, either. Lambiase is coming in to strengthen a team “under Andrea’s leadership”, not to replace it.
Stella’s CV makes him an easy name to toss into Ferrari hypotheticals. He spent more than a decade at the Scuderia, rising from the test team to the sharp end, working with Michael Schumacher during the period that delivered the German’s final three world titles. He later played a key role in Kimi Räikkönen’s 2007 championship campaign and worked with Fernando Alonso before leaving for McLaren in 2015 as head of race operations. His ascent to team principal and the 2025 double with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri only made him more attractive as an “if only” figure for Ferrari fans.
But Alesi’s point is that Ferrari doesn’t need another shiny name to fix what is, in modern F1, an organisational problem rather than a personality one. He’s backing Vasseur not because the Frenchman is flawless, but because he’s doing the job Ferrari’s environment demands: holding the centre while everybody else pulls at the edges.
“Fred has been doing an excellent job from day one,” Alesi said, stressing how uniquely punishing the Ferrari team boss role is compared to anywhere else on the grid. “At Ferrari it is a different story. It has been multiplied by 100 percent…”
He also pushed back against the outdated myth that one leader can simply impose a direction and drag the whole operation to glory. The cars are too complex, the departments too specialised, and the internal politics too easily inflamed. Alesi’s argument — basically, that the team principal’s real superpower is alignment — lands close to what you hear quietly in the paddock when the microphones are off: the teams that win consistently are the teams that don’t spend half their energy fighting themselves.
That’s also why he brought up Vasseur’s frustration last year. Ferrari’s 2025 season didn’t deliver a single grand prix win, and the team slid from second to fourth in the final third of the championship. The pressure that comes with that sort of drop-off at Ferrari is never linear; it’s tidal. Alesi’s view is that the criticism didn’t just target Vasseur — it “upset the balance” inside the team, making the boss’s job exponentially harder because his priority became cohesion rather than lap time.
From Ferrari’s perspective, the defence is straightforward: the organisation was already leaning heavily towards 2026, with the regulation reset looming. That bet is now beginning to show on-track.
Alesi believes the early signs are positive. Ferrari hasn’t started 2026 as the benchmark — Mercedes has that honour so far — but it is positioned as the closest challenger. The Scuderia is second in the Constructors’ Championship, 45 points behind Mercedes, with Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton running third and fourth in the drivers’ standings behind the two Mercedes drivers.
There’s also a structural piece that matters as the season develops. Ferrari is set to benefit from Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) on its power unit, which could become a significant lever as the year progresses — the sort of built-in chance to chip away at Mercedes’s early advantage without needing to reinvent the whole package.
That context is what makes the Stella speculation feel slightly off-key. Even if you rate Stella highly — and plenty in the pitlane do — Ferrari’s immediate question isn’t “who’s the next team principal?” It’s whether the current leadership can keep the technical groups pulling in the same direction long enough for the 2026 car and power unit to mature. Alesi is betting Vasseur can.
And in truth, Ferrari doesn’t look like a team in need of a public scramble for a saviour. It looks like a team that can’t afford another bout of self-inflicted turbulence just as the first real rhythm of the new rules starts to emerge.
