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Ferrari to poach Mercedes chief amid staff exodus
According to reports Mercedes are set to lose performance director Loic Serra to Ferrari at the end of his contract. Ferrari are currently on the hunt for multiple high-profile employees, after several members of staff left Maranello since the arrival of new team principal Frederic Vasseur. The Italians have already lost former head of concept David Sanchez to McLaren, whilst race director Laurent Mekies will become AlphaTauri’s team principal next season and has gone onto gardening leave. Signing Serra will be a huge boost for Vasseur and for Ferrari, whilst it’s also a sizeable loss for Mercedes.However, having spent 15 years with the Silver Arrows, Serra is reportedly not set to make the move to Maranello until his current contract expires in 2025. It does mean though, that he’ll be in red when the new power unit regulations are introduced in 2026. Ferrari and Serra are believed to be finalising the final few details, before an announcement is made. Interestingly, Vasseur recently revealed that he’d “signed a top guy” to “join in 2025”, perhaps indicating that Serra will 100% make the switch. “We know that if we want to recruit, we are speaking not in days, we are speaking in years,” Vasseur told Marca. “I signed a top guy a couple of weeks ago to join in 2025. He will only work on the car in 2025 and 2026. It seems a long wait but on the other hand, if you don’t do it, it will be even worse in six months. You have to accept it as a basic of F1.”
Whilst losing Serra will be frustrating for team principal Toto Wolff, the Austrian will likely move on quickly. Wolff previously admitted that employees moving to rivals is simply part of F1, with it happening “all the time”. “We lost some to Red Bull in the same way we lost some to Ferrari and we lost some to Renault,” said Wolff, "We are not bragging about having people join us from Red Bull, we have not mentioned the names but we have a constant influx of Red Bull people as we have from the other teams. That is happening all the time and so the people they’ve hired, we wish them the best. Some of them were retired in our organisation and ended up there in leading positions, but that’s fine, so they’ve been given a second life.”