Jerome d’Ambrosio may be the lowest-profile of the Ferrari Formula 1 teams’s trio of recruits from Mercedes, with Lewis Hamilton and, to a lesser extent, technical director chassis Loic Serra, triggering more headlines. But the man team principal Fred Vasseur describes as having “the perfect profile” to be his lieutenant is already having a big impact.
D’Ambrosio joined as deputy team principal and head of the Ferrari Driver Academy last October. Best known in F1 circles for his 20-race career as a driver in 2011-12, he switched to team management after his retirement from driving at the end of the 2019-2020 Formula E season, then joined Mercedes in 2023 to head its young driver programme. His arrival at Ferrari last October made him an obvious ally for Hamilton when he pitched up at Maranello in January.
“Lewis doesn’t need any help to be introduced into a team or get to know people,” said d’Ambrosio when asked by The Race about the role he played in helping Hamilton to adapt to Ferrari. “He’s quite amazing with people and the team already loved him after the first day.
“The areas where it’s been perhaps quite useful is already knowing his [support] team. A driver doesn’t come alone to a team, they have their own team, their own management, people around them. I have already interacted with them in a past life.
“I guess in that respect it was quite easy to know where the expectations were and what’s the background and what can already be plug-in-and-play and what had to be approached slightly differently based on a different environment.”
The 39-year-old’s role in helping Hamilton integrate is incidental, given he has a far broader role to play as Vasseur’s deputy. It’s a key appointment, a position well-established in the Ferrari hierarchy given Laurent Mekies, now Racing Bulls team principal, held it from 2021 to 2023.
D’Ambrosio, who has experience as a team boss in Formula E with Venturi, is far more than an ex-driver who has found his way into a team hierarchy and has a significantly wider set of skills. When it comes to Hamilton’s arrival, he’s quick to stress that his career as a driver is only one part of the experience that shapes his role.
“One has to be careful,” he says of the contribution of his driving experience.”It’s easier for me than most people to build empathy for what a driver goes through and in that way, understand the dynamics between driver, team, what happens when you’re in the car and so on.
“But that’s where I need to draw the line, and where it’s really important to draw the line because Lewis and Charles [Leclerc] are some of the best drivers Formula 1 has seen, Lewis is the most successful driver F1 has seen, they don’t have anything to learn from anyone in terms of driving.
“One of the potential things I personally don’t [want to] fall into the trap of is what you sometimes hear from ex-drivers is ‘back in my day it was like this or I used to do this or that’. That’s absolutely not the case. The only thing that is relevant is the ability to build that empathy in an easier way.”
So what does d’Ambrosio’s role involve? He expects to attend 18 races, starting with the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, then skipping the second race in China because “it’s highly inefficient”. The plan for the rest of the season is malleable and while his role at the track is important, he also has a key role at Maranello.
“The goal with Fred is to be complementary,” says d'Ambrosio. “I will be at the first race but we don’t want to leave the factory uncovered for too long, so we’ll split like that and I’ll be the one that will stay some of the races at home and be in the factory. Obviously the exact number of races will depend on how our 2026 project is evolving and we’ll decide a little bit towards the end on that last leg of flyaways how we want to handle it.”
The intention is for him and Vasseur to split the workload, with d’Ambrosio a true number two to Vasseur. It’s unclear whether that means potential successor for whatever point in the distant future when Vasseur moves on, but that will likely be dictated by d’Ambrosio’s own progress in the role. For now, it’s about striking up a close working relationship with the avuncular but ruthlessly competitive Frenchman.
“The way we work and the way we operate with Fred - and it’s been like that from day one - is we split the tasks,” says d’Ambrosio. “There’s no real perimeter. I will have topics on my desk that will go from purely engineering to performance to finance to HR, whatever the topics of the TP are. We split it like that.
“We’re able to work like that because we’re in very close proximity. We have our offices in front of one another, we probably speak 20 times a day so it works. There’s no plan to evolve that at the moment because it works really well.”
D’Ambrosio also confirmed that the split will involve him taking on some media tasks, as well as dealing with drivers and engineers. It’s a broad role that touches on all aspects of the team principal job, given that a big part of his value is in lightening the massive load on Vasseur
“A race weekend is filled with different things for a team principal from commercial to performance,” says d’Ambrosio. "The reason why I ended up joining Ferrari and had the opportunity is because Fred was a bit stretched thin at some points and I’ll be supporting him with every possible task that he needs support with.”
It’s clear he has Vasseur’s confidence. A great strength of Vasseur’s has been giving clear direction and then delegating to those who work with him, meaning that he is sure to make effective use of d’Ambrosio.
“Jerome will be important [and] add value to the team,” says Vasseur. “He has the perfect profile for me; very transferable knowledge of business, he was a team principal, he was a driver in F1, he has the experience from Mercedes. He’ll help us. He’ll help me a lot in the situation of the team and the evolution of the management. It will be a huge step forward and the first couple of months of collaboration are already positive.”
D'Ambrosio's F1 driving career
D’Ambrosio’s career as an F1 racer was relatively brief, amounting to a full season with Virgin in 2011 and a one-off in place of the banned Romain Grosjean at Lotus in 2012 at Monza.
That final appearance in the Italian Grand Prix could have yielded a points finish, but for the loss of KERS after six laps. Despite that lost laptime, he made a good impression with his pace in race conditions and finished 13th, his best F1 result.
The fact that a non-points finish was a career high reflected more on the limitations of the 2011 Virgin than on d’Ambrosio. It was a difficult season for the team, which decided early on to part company with technical director Nick Wirth and ceased development on the car to focus on the 2012 machine.
That meant a car that wasn’t easy to drive and that created all sorts of tyre troubles in the first season of high-degradation Pirelli rubber. Hardly the ideal circumstances for a rookie to make an impression.
But there were some high points. D’Ambrosio outqualified his more experienced (and quick) team-mate Timo Glock a couple of times early in the season in China and Turkey but had a setback in Canada when he crashed in Friday practice and damaged the chassis.
He bounced back from that and put in a decent run of performances later in the season, which culminated in a superb qualifying lap in Japan, where he was also ahead of Glock. He also put in a strong race drive in Singapore.
But it was all to no avail given d’Ambrosio never managed to finish higher than 14th, enduring difficult outings in India and Abu Dhabi before signing off with a strong weekend in Brazil, where he outqualified and outraced Glock.
Virgin had decided to take Charles Pic in his place for the following year, but in his one full season d’Ambrosio made a good impression with his professionalism and intelligent approach, even if he didn’t show the stellar speed needed to ensure he stayed on the grid.
That he was held in high regard is reflected by the fact that, outside of his Virgin season, he spent three years as a Renault/Lotus reserve in 2010 and 2012-13 prior to turning his attention to Formula E.
