Ferrari confirm launch date for 2026 Formula 1 campaign

Ferrari will launch their 2026 Formula 1 campaign on January 23, just three days before private pre-season testing begins at Barcelona.

The Scuderia remained tight-lipped about their plans for the launch, but Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur confirmed the date during his annual Christmas end-of-season press conference at Fiorano, Italy.

The Ferrari launch will be on the same day as Alpine kick off their season with an event in Barcelona and Haas reveal their plans with a digital launch.

When asked if Ferrari is going “full risk” with their car in a bid to hit the ground running with sweeping new chassis and Power Unit regulations for 2026, Vasseur said: “Nobody is conservative or aggressive or taking risks, it’s quite often when you discover what the others did, that you say, ‘oh I was mega aggressive’ or ‘I was mega conservative’.

“But honestly today…I can’t speak about the others, I don’t know about the others, but it’s true that we will have the picture, not in Barcelona I don’t think, so let’s say Bahrain, and you will see that different teams took different directions, sometimes perhaps a bit 180 degrees, but we don’t have the feeling to be aggressive or not.

“What is aggressive is to postpone the release of drawings at max, to arrive in the last minute in Barcelona or in Bahrain with a car that will be assembled in the garage. This is aggressive. If you want to finish one month before, it’s not aggressive at all, it’s conservative.

“On this we will be aggressive for sure, because we were always. We will finish the assembly of the car the day before the launch, the launch will be the 23rd January, which means we will finish the car on the 22nd, and this is to be aggressive.

“But everybody will do the same, now we have a convergence in the approach of the season, and everybody will do the same.”

Ferrari will look to hit back in 2026 after a difficult 2025 campaign that yielded no wins and P4 in the Teams’ Championship, behind champions McLaren, Mercedes and Red Bull.

That came a year after they had pushed McLaren all the way to the decider in the fight for the Teams’ Championship.

The Italian team will field an unchanged line-up of Charles Leclerc and seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton who will contest their eighth and second seasons respectively for the Italian team.