Hamilton Backs Vasseur, Points Above Him at Ferrari

Ferrari spent Tuesday telling the paddock that Fred Vasseur isn’t going anywhere. Lewis Hamilton spent Thursday at Sepang saying the same thing, then added a sentence no communications department would have drafted for him.

“It’s lots and lots of people coming together and if you want to point fingers, point them somewhere else,” Hamilton said ahead of this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix, which is being run at Sepang this year. “There’s people above that are also part of it as well. It’s a lot of people.”

He named nobody. He didn’t have to. At Ferrari, the team principal answers to chief executive Benedetto Vigna and executive chairman John Elkann, and the racing team sits inside a publicly listed carmaker. “People above” is a very short list.

Two votes of confidence, two different jobs

The team’s own statement came first. At a Tuesday briefing, chief communication officer Maria Conti said: “Ferrari has made its choices already. We have full confidence in Fred Vasseur and in his team.” It was a direct response to Christian Horner publicly calling Ferrari his “dream” destination, a story we tracked in Tuesday’s briefing.

Hamilton welcomed it, sort of. “I think it’s good that they did it,” he said. “In terms of how it unifies the team, I think we already were unified.” Translation: thanks, but we didn’t need the memo.

Put the two statements side by side and they’re doing different work. Conti’s protects the team principal by putting the company’s name behind him. Hamilton’s protects the team principal by widening the circle of accountability. One closes the conversation. The other moves it up a floor.

That’s a bigger swing than it sounds, and Hamilton has been here before. Last November, after a double retirement in Brazil, Elkann said Ferrari’s drivers should talk less and focus on driving. Hamilton’s reply at the time was pointedly calm: “I speak to John every week. We have an amazing relationship.” A driver with a weekly line to the chairman doesn’t need a press pen to send a message upstairs. Choosing to say it in public anyway is the message.

He also made clear he’s still pushing from inside: “Fred has done a lot of the changes that I’ve asked for and there are more for us to do.”

Ferrari’s favourite fix hasn’t fixed anything

Hamilton’s most useful line was a history lesson. “If you look at the history, how many people they’ve swapped out in that role and I feel like it’s in a better place than it’s been before, but ultimately, it’s not a one man situation.”

The record supports him. Vasseur is the fourth person to run the Scuderia since Stefano Domenicali resigned in April 2014: Marco Mattiacci lasted until that November, Maurizio Arrivabene ran the team until early 2019, Mattia Binotto until the end of 2022, and Vasseur arrived for 2023. Over the same stretch, Mercedes, the team Hamilton left, has been led by one person, Toto Wolff.

Ferrari’s last titles came in 2007 and 2008. Changing the person in the chair has been Maranello’s default response for more than a decade, and it hasn’t produced a championship yet. Ferrari’s management seemed to accept that logic when it gave Vasseur a multi-year renewal on July 31, 2025. Fourteen months on, the question being asked in public is whether that commitment holds.

The FIA already measured Hamilton’s complaint

The sharpest part of Hamilton’s defence wasn’t about people at all. “We’re second in the Constructors’ Championship – huge improvement from last year already – and that’s with a deficit on power of an average four tenths every single weekend.”

Four tenths is a driver’s estimate. The governing body’s number is harder to argue with. Under the 2026 power unit rules, the FIA’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities system (ADUO) compares each manufacturer’s internal combustion engine against the best one on the grid. Fall at least 2% short over a review period and you get extra development allowances.

After the first review period, which ended after Canada, the FIA placed Ferrari, Audi and Honda in the worst band, more than 4% off the benchmark. Each got two extra homologations across 2026 and 2027, plus more cost-cap and dyno allowance. Mercedes landed in the 2–4% band and got one. With Mercedes, Ferrari, Audi and Honda all on the list, the benchmark engine was by elimination Red Bull Ford’s. Nobody qualified in the second period, which ran through Hungary.

So the claim that Ferrari’s problem is mostly in the engine isn’t spin. The FIA has effectively signed off on it. What the ruling doesn’t settle is who owns a deficit that size. A combustion engine more than 4% behind isn’t something a team principal fixes between Baku and Sepang. It comes from engineering and investment decisions made years earlier, the kind approved well above the pit wall. That’s the backdrop to Hamilton’s “people above.”

The allowance isn’t a free lunch, either. Extra homologations don’t waive the grid penalties that come with fitting hardware beyond a driver’s season allocation, which is why we looked at what using an ADUO upgrade costs Leclerc on the grid. Mercedes faces the same trade-off with its single upgrade, as Russell’s looming penalty shows.

What the table says

Strip out the noise and Ferrari’s season splits in two. Second in the constructors’ standings on 378 points is real progress. So are wins for Hamilton in Barcelona and Leclerc at Silverstone. But Mercedes is 160 points clear on 538, McLaren is 72 behind Ferrari on 306, and Ferrari has gone five events without a podium. In Baku, Leclerc finished fourth and Hamilton sixth.

In the drivers’ championship, Kimi Antonelli leads on 302, George Russell has 236, and Hamilton is third on 199, 20 points ahead of Leclerc. Both Ferrari drivers are close enough to Russell to make second place a fight, and a long way from a title.

What to watch at Sepang

Friday offered Ferrari something rare lately: the top of a timesheet. Leclerc topped second practice with a 1:37.528, 0.099s clear of Isack Hadjar. Hamilton was fifth, 0.305s back, complained he couldn’t see through his right mirror, and was noted for an alleged impeding incident with Gabriel Bortoleto.

Don’t read too much into it. FP2 ran under rain threat, with most teams starting on mediums before switching to softs. Sepang’s two long straights, linked by the final hairpin, will expose any combustion-engine deficit far more clearly on Sunday than a Friday qualifying-style lap does. For the bigger picture, our Sepang weekend notebook has the full setup.

One more reason this weekend counts: the FIA’s third ADUO review period covers races 12 to 18, Netherlands to Mexico City. Sepang is round 16, so every lap Ferrari runs here feeds the next ruling on its engine. A podium would quiet the Vasseur talk for a week or two. Without one, Hamilton has already said where he thinks the questions should go.