The teams are enjoying their visit to Shanghai this year as blue skies are the order of the day rather than the usual smog which encircles the Formula One track in Shanghai. Now the second round of the year, this year’s Chinese GP will take place on a circuit which has been completely resurfaced.
As a result Oscar Piastri’s pole position was just over three seconds quicker than Red Bull’s Max Verstappen’s was in the People’s Republic this time last year. The extra grip is remarkable but the trade off will be in increased tyre degradation come the 56 lap race on Sunday with drivers reporting their cars are ‘hopping’ as the tyres bite into the new sticky surface.
When the cars lose rear end traction, they most usually slide, but in Shanghai they’ve been gripping up again straight away causing the car to hop. Lando Norris first run in Q3 showed this dramatically as he took the final corner before the start finish straight. The line through the turn suggested he would be taking a significant amount of the kerb, but his rear end snapped quickly into place making the McLaren’s drivers job to push for the line a lot easier.
Ferrari make changes to winning car
Sprint weekends are notoriously difficult to predict and with Lewis Hamilton romping to victory in the Sprint, Ferrari looked set for the remainder of the weekend. But with the Grand Prix in mind, the team decided to tweak the cars before Saturday qualifying as Lewis Hamilton admitted.
“We made a couple of changes to the car after sprint qualifying, to rectify some problems we had,” Hamilton explained in the media pen. Yet the result was not as Ferrari would have hoped, as Hamilton could only manage P5 with his team mate one slot further back.
The changes made the car “quite snappy” Hamilton revealed, although this was presumably a result of the wind picking up. As the Scuderia engineers geared Hamilton’s setup towards more front end grip to prevent the tyres from graining on Sunday, the trade off is the car experiences some addition rear end instability.
In the Sprint all the drivers elected the medium tyre, but after nineteen laps of racing most were finished as their drivers complained. Carlos Sainz was the only driver to switch his tyres on lap 11 and the exact nature of the degradation the field were suffering became immediately obvious.
Sainz demonstrates drastic tyre degradation
The Williams driver was immediately over a second and half quicker than race leader Lewis Hamilton on his first full flying lap after the stop, and remained quicker than the Ferrari driver to the end of the race. The drivers in all probability will start tomorrow’s Grand Prix on the medium compound they used in the Sprint and with just one lap of life, the soft tyres will be confined to the back of the garage.
All the drivers have two fresh sets of hard tyre for the Grand Prix, but non of them have experienced this compound yet and so warm up times are difficult to calculate. Despite this the undercut will be super powerful in this year’s Chinese GP and it could be for any of the front runners an early pit stop is likely to be the key to beating their rivals.
Pole sitter Oscar Piastri admitted after qualifying, he too had requested some small changes to his McLaren car’s setup, again with an eye to improving tyre degradation for Sunday’s Grand Prix. “We changed a few things. I wasn’t perfectly happy with the car I had in sprint quali and the sprint, so I was trying to make it a bit better for today – and honestly probably more for tomorrow,” he said.
“I’m not sure yet whether it was necessarily better or worse,” he candidly admitted. “I think it was maybe a small step better. I think the pace both days has been similar. It’s just been quite tricky to get lap times out of it.”
Leclerc believes Ferrari “not fast enough”
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc also switched up his setup following the Sprint, but the Monegasque driver appeared to be at something of a loss what to think. “There wasn’t anything more [pace]. It’s a bit frustrating because obviously yesterday I wasn’t really on it and there was the potential at that moment for pole,” revealed Leclerc.
“I felt like today I was more on it considering it’s a track where I have always struggled, I felt like I did the best out of what was capable from my side.”
Across the course of the 56 lap race, Leclerc believes the Ferrari’s “are just not fast enough.” He identified his thoughts from Australia remained the same that “in qualy we would be three tenths off – I feel like today we put every bit together and we are three tenths off, and I’ll say this is the gap that there is between the McLaren and ourselves at the moment.”
A Ferrari win in Shanghai would be a “surprise” for Leclerc although in such a tyre critical race surprises may well be possible. Ferrari have this year had lower tyre degradation than some of their rivals, something Leclerc highlights maybe the key to their strategy and success in just a few hour time.
The undercut is the gamble to take
“That’s a positive sign, because obviously especially with the longer stints and a longer race, then we can hopefully use our advantage with the tyre degradation,” Leclerc confirmed. “But with the dirty air as I experienced this morning it’s very, very, very difficult to make a pass on track.
“It’s going to be a bit difficult to recover on track. But with strategy if we manage to put ourselves in the right place at the right time, not having too much dirty air, I feel like we might surprise ourselves,” concluded the Ferrari driver.
Leclerc’s comments may suggest Ferrari are thinking of ditching the medium tyre as early as possible in the Grand Prix, this would drop them into clean air as their rivals attempt to maximise the use of the medium compound.
The Ferrari drivers could then bring in the hard compounds as gently as they wish, knowing when they’re up to temperature they will be quicker than those who remain on the yellow walled tyre for longer. The key to what should be a strong undercut strategy is making the decision to stop much earlier than the rest of the teams expect, if Ferrari make their first stops somewhere near the expected pit stop window, they’ll just trigger a string of tyre changes from the other front runners around them.
Sainz offers clues from the Sprint which demonstrate an aggressive tyre strategy will be required to take advantage of significant tyre degradation at the Shanghai circuit, the risk of course is being a sitting duck at the end of the race with tyres that have now gone of the cliff.
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F1 rookie review: The good, the bad and the ugly
The 2025 Formula One season saw six new drivers with a full year’s contract ahead of them, although the likes of Liam Lawson and Jack Doohan have full F1 weekends under their belt already.
The surprise of the season to date is the pace of the Racing Bulls team, with Yuki Tsunoda in his fifth year in F1 joined by rookie Isaac Hadjar, who just missed out on last year’s F2 championship.
Tsunoda has three top ten finishes in the qualifying sessions this year although in China he [played second fiddle to his team mate who will start the Grand Prix and P7 with the Japanese driver two slots back. Yuki has collected points in both Melbourne and the Sprint in Shanghai and on pace analysis is in good shape to add to those in the Grand Prix tomorrow… READ MORE
With over 30 years of experience in Formula 1 as an insider journalist, I have built trusted connections across the paddock, from race engineers and mechanics to senior team figures. At The Judge 13, I and a handful of trusted colleagues share exclusive Formula 1 news, expert analysis and behind-the-scenes stories you will not find in mainstream motorsport media.
