While Ferrari took their first win of the 2023 season in Singapore, it was Frederic Vasseur’s first ever Formula 1 victory – How the team boss experienced the moment
The 2023 Singapore Grand Prix saw a new face on the Formula One podium: Ferrari sent Frederic Vasseur to the podium with the Spaniard when Carlos Sainz won. For the team boss, it was his first ever Formula One victory.
“Honestly, it was a strange feeling for me at the pit wall because I wasn’t too stressed in the last few laps,” Vasseur reported, explaining that he felt “Carlos was really in control of the situation.”
He was probably much “more stressed looking back at the last few laps an hour after the race,” speculates Vasseur, who took his first Formula 1 win but has a track record of success in motorsport as a whole.
As early as 1996, he competed for the first time with the ASM team he founded and celebrated victories and titles in various Formula 3 series in the years that followed. Further successes followed later with the ART team, which won the GP2 series several times, among other things.
Has celebrated titles with Rosberg and Hamilton
In the process, Vasseur worked with numerous later Formula 1 drivers, including the future world champions Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton, who won the GP2 title in 2005 and 2006 respectively and were promoted to the premier class the following year.
Vasseur himself, however, has so far always been denied the really big successes in Formula 1. “Of course it was a bit emotional on the podium because it was the first one,” the 55-year-old, who made his first appearance in the premier class in 2016, therefore reported after the Singapore race.
Vasseur’s first steps in Formula 1, by the way, lasted less than twelve months. After becoming team principal at the then Renault works team in 2016, which now competes as Alpine, he left the racing team again after just one season.
In mid-2017, he docked with Sauber (later Alfa Romeo) in the same capacity, where he stayed until the end of 2022, but with the team’s limited resources never had the opportunity to fight for the really big successes. Then, at the end of last year, Ferrari came knocking.
Difficult start at Ferrari
He did not have an easy start as Mattia Binotto’s successor. Ferrari had actually started with the goal of fighting for the World Championship title in 2023. However, it became clear early on in the season that this would not work.
Vasseur therefore reveals that after his first victory he had to think back to where the team had stood after the second race of the season in Saudi Arabia. “Jeddah was a tough weekend for us and we recovered very well after Jeddah,” he stresses.
They had shown “good teamwork” and “step by step gained confidence and pace.” This was rewarded in Singapore with the first win of the season, and Vasseur emphasises: “I’m more than proud of the work the factory and the team have done.”
Time will tell if it was just the beginning of a very big success story.