Ferrari play down storm clouds as Vasseur goes on the front foot for Austin
Ferrari arrive in Austin with headlines swirling and chins set. After a bumpy run through late summer — and a blunt assessment from Charles Leclerc that lit up the Italian press — Fred Vasseur has drawn a line under the chatter. The message before the United States Grand Prix? Noise outside. Focus inside.
In Italy, the temperature spiked when Leclerc, never one to varnish a sentence, suggested Ferrari have slipped behind a Mercedes now mixing it with McLaren and Red Bull. That was followed by reports of irked engineers and tense corridors at Maranello, the sort of whispers that gather quickly when the results don’t.
Vasseur isn’t having it. Speaking ahead of a Sprint weekend at the Circuit of the Americas, the team principal acknowledged the shortfall without flinching, then pushed back on the narrative of internal fracture.
“After two street tracks, we go back to a permanent circuit that demands precision,” he said, nodding to COTA’s blend of fast direction changes and traction zones. “With the Sprint, there’s one practice and you’re straight into it. We know we haven’t maximised our package in the last races, but the team is united and fully determined to turn things around.”
That last line is doing a lot of work. Ferrari’s form has drifted at exactly the wrong time, just as rivals have found a groove. Red Bull’s development push has put Max Verstappen back in a familiar rhythm at the sharp end, while Mercedes — inconsistent early on — have sharpened up. It’s tightened the fight for second in the Constructors’ standings behind the benchmark McLaren, and it’s left Ferrari nursing a run they’d rather forget.
Leclerc’s candour, as ever, cut through the fluff. His point wasn’t a grenade tossed at the factory; it was a diagnosis. The car’s peak looks narrow, the setup window a bit too picky, and when the SF-25 slips out of that sweet spot, the lap time seems to leave in a hurry. That’s been compounded by race-day issues — brake management among them — and Sunday afternoons turning into exercises in damage limitation rather than opportunity.
All of which drops Ferrari into one of the calendar’s trickier balancing acts. COTA is a track of compromises. The first sector rewards aero efficiency and confidence over the bumps; the back straight and big braking zones expose drag and rear stability. Add the Sprint format — one hour to get on top of ride height, wind, tyres, kerbs, the whole lot — and the margin for error shrinks.
The positive for Ferrari is that this is a weekend built for clear direction and clean execution, two things Vasseur has prioritised since he took the reins. Expectations have been reset before and the team’s floor of results this season has been reasonably high even when the ceiling’s felt out of reach. The Hamilton-Leclerc pairing remains a potent qualifying force, and if the car’s balance lands where the drivers need it on Friday, they’re perfectly capable of turning the mood on its head by Saturday afternoon.
Inside the garage, the dynamic is calmer than the headlines suggest. Leclerc speaks his mind; Lewis Hamilton is methodical and unflappable when a car needs coaxing into its window; Vasseur is pragmatic. That triad won’t always produce sunshine quotes, but it does tend to produce a plan.
What Ferrari can’t afford is another weekend where they start on the back foot and spend the rest of it firefighting. The Constructors’ table doesn’t wait for anyone, and the slipstream from Austin runs straight into Mexico City and Interlagos — circuits that can magnify strengths and punish indecision.
So, unity or not, the stopwatch will have its say. Vasseur’s tone is firm, his brief concise: tidy the Fridays, give the drivers a car they can lean on in the Esses, keep the rear tidy off Turn 11, and let the points take care of themselves. The rest — the rumours, the anonymous quotes, the armchair autopsies — evaporates quickly when the red cars are in the mix on merit.
Ferrari don’t need a miracle this weekend. They need a baseline, a clean Sprint, and a Sunday that looks like a team rediscovering its range. If they get that, the conversation around Maranello changes just as fast as it started.
