Fred Vasseur refuses to comment on the reasons behind Laurent Mekies’ Ferrari exit

Fred Vasseur has refused to say whether being looked over for the Ferrari team boss role was the reason Laurent Mekies signed with AlphaTauri.

Earlier this week AlphaTauri announced that team boss Franz Tost, at the helm since 2005, would be leaving at the end of this season and would be replaced by Ferrari sporting director Mekies.

The announcement brought to an end weeks of speculation with the Italian media having claimed Mekies could follow former team boss Mattia Binotto out the door with Frenchman said to be unhappy with Ferrari’s higher-ups after being passed over for the team boss job.

Although the 46-year-old was in the running to replace Binotto, when the announcement finally came the job went to Vasseur. Mekies will instead head to AlphaTauri in 2024 to take up the reins.

Asked if his compatriot’s departure was because he didn’t get the Ferrari job, Vasseur said as per Motorsport.com: “I think for this you have to ask to Laurent.”

“But,” he added, “it’s true that if you want to become the team principal of an F1 team, you have 10 jobs in the world. It’s not that you can find it everywhere.

“It means that if it was the personal goal of Laurent, I can perfectly understand this. You have to be ambitious, Laurent is as an ambitious person, and I think he did a very good job for Ferrari. And I can understand the motivation and the expectation points.”

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Mekies谣言的出口有了rounds for the past few weeks but Vasseur calling AlphaTauri’s announcement “aggressive”, it begged the question when was the 54-year-old informed by Mekies that he’d be leaving.

There too Vasseur wouldn’t say.

“This is the relationship between Laurent and myself, and I won’t disclose details,” he replied. “But we had a very open discussion on this, because I’ve known Laurent for 30 years.

“And I think that it’s very difficult to refuse this kind of proposal for him. And he was very open on the discussion.

“I can perfectly put myself in Laurent’s position. And I think it’s quite impossible to refuse when you are in this business to become a team principal.”

And he believes Mekies, who previously worked for AlphaTauri under the Toro Rosso name before leaving for the FIA and then Ferrari, will do a good job in the role.

“If you are looking for a team principal in F1 you don’t have so long a list of people knowing F1, the FIA and so on,” said the Ferrari team boss. “You have a list of five or 10 people in the group.

“I think he has a very, very wide understanding of the business, coming from race engineer to the FIA. And for sure, in this kind of job, you are looking for someone with a complete understanding of the business. And I think he will do a good job.”